Chronovisor

Benedictine monk Father Pellegrino Ernetti claimed to have invented, alongside Enrico Fermi and Wernher von Braun, a device called the Chronovisor, capable of transmitting events of the past as if live on TV. He professed to have witnessed orations by Cicero and the Crucifixion, though the evidence he provided, reported in the Italian press, was widely disputed. Taking this as their jumping-off point, filmmakers Kevin Walker and Jack Auen engage in a form of time travel as well, following Columbia scholar Béatrice Courte (real-life professor Anne-Laure Sellier), who comes across the Chronovisor while researching an unrelated topic and then, like countless hyperlink- or microfiche-surfing grad students before her, gets lost on an academic side quest. Traveling deeper and deeper into a stubbornly analog archive, she unearths an elaborate web of conjecture and conspiracy reaching all the way up to the highest echelons of the Vatican.
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Dense with on-screen text from real primary sources, scored to music by Gustav Holst, and shot on 16mm in the pooling shadows of many of New York City’s historic libraries, Chronovisor is a witty literary mystery about one of the many secrets that still hide out in libraries, waiting for someone with time, curiosity, and a JSTOR login to come along and disturb the dusty stacks – one of the year’s most singular and formally assured feature debuts.

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International Film Festival Rotterdam 2026 – Bright Future, World Premiere
New Directors/New Films 2026 – New York
Visions du Réel 2026

Kevin Walker and Jack Auen are a filmmaking duo originally from Baltimore and now based in New York, working at the intersection of fiction and documentary. They are the founders of the film collective and production company Cosmic Salon, whose work often combines fiction, documentary observation and experimental filmmaking. Their previous shorts, including Marblehead (2021), Roundabout (2024) and Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (2025), have screened at international festivals, with the latter competing in the Tiger Short Competition at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Chronovisor is their first feature, bringing together analogue research, occult mystery and the shadowy atmosphere of 1970s film noir in a strange story that slips between time and reality.

Marblehead (2021) - short film
I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning (2022) - short film
Roundabout (2024) - short film
Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (2025) - short film

Directors: Kevin Walker, Jack Auen
Cast: Anne Laure Sellier, Nicholas Tebben, Nicole Dombrowski Risser, Alex Kolodkin, José Pacheco de Almeida
Cinematography: Leo Zhang
Screenwriters: Jack Auen, Kevin Walker
Producer: Jason Zuriff
Editors: Jack Auen, Kevin Walker
Music: Gustav Holst
Production Designer: Alex Peña
Sound Designer: Eric Zhang
Hungarian Distributor: -
Colour: colour
Run Time: 99 mins

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