After their parents' deaths, siblings Liza and John Carroll are placed in the care of their uncle, a traveling con artist who scams the grieving with fradulent spirit photographs, until they arrive at a Spiritualist commune where the barrier between the living and the dead is very thin.

"In the west end of London, an apparently crazed individual is on the loose, breaking into art galleries and private homes to slash valuable paintings of women. Despite Scotland Yard's best efforts, the criminal remains at large and continues on his destructive path. When Joanna and the Watsons are called in to solve the mystery, they soon discover that although the canvases have been slashed, their backings remain pristine, with no cuts or scratches....

"Ousmane Sembène ... made his feature debut in 1966 with the brilliant and stirring Black Girl. Sembène, who was also an acclaimed novelist in his native Senegal, transforms a deceptively simple plot--about a young Senegalese woman who moves to France to work for a wealthy white family and finds that life in their small apartment becomes a prison, both figuratively and literally--into a complexly layered critique of the lingering colonialist...