Possession

Andrzej Żuławski's Possession arrived at Cannes in 1981 and won Isabelle Adjani the Best Actress prize; she took the César for Best Actress the following year as well, an unprecedented double for a single performance in the festival's history. Bruno Nuytten shot it in Cold War West Berlin in late 1980, and the divided city of the period is inseparable from its setting and visual texture. Carlo Rambaldi, who had just designed the alien for Alien, made the creature effects.

Its initial American release was heavily cut: Limelight Pictures distributed a version forty minutes shorter, recut as a horror film. Żuławski's full edit survived for decades only on European prints and bootleg tapes. Restored versions began appearing in the 2010s, critics reassessed the film several times over, and Sight & Sound returned it to its Greatest Films of All Time list in 2022.

Sam Neill plays opposite Adjani, with the Fassbinder regulars Heinz Bennent and Margit Carstensen in supporting roles. Żuławski wrote the script in the wake of his own divorce, and the shoot was notoriously hard; Adjani has said she needed a long recovery afterwards. Her performance has passed into European cinema folklore as one of the most physically committed ever filmed, and younger actors still bring it up in interviews when they talk about what the job can demand of a person.