Three cities — Utrecht, Naples, Rome — and two love affairs guide a homosexual man on his nightly search for lost beauty. In a cross between a diary and a baroque play, the film reconstructs the fragments of a fateful jour­ney against a Caravaggio backdrop. Painting, sensuality, losing oneself in a cityscape: Tenebrae Lessons form an obscure fresco, a white-hot collage of trashy vanity.

Director Vincent Dieutre describes it best, "We spent months collecting unrelated fragments: sensual super8 footage, wide land­scapes in 35mm, twilit paintings, interviews, sounds, texts, music. Everything that took place in my life as a filmmaker, homosexual, and art lover found its way into the film project — sensory impressions, erotic encounters, technical constraints. A fragile, sharp-edged fiction of liberated emotion rose out of the documentary material. These Tenebrae Lessons is possibly a film about art, possibly a film about love, but certainly a film about a love of art."