Feast of Death

Novelist James Ellroy, famous chiefly for the adaptation of his book L.A. Confidential, speaks with an overwhelming barrage of words, like bullets of sex and violence, inspired by the unsolved murder of his young mother. He reads passages from his work and talks to fans in a bookstore in the same hilarious and coarse style. He drives around nocturnal Los Angeles, shrouded in ghostly blue light, and attends a dinner meeting with a group of agent friends. There, the camera is directed at the faces of the men who, apart from a black sense of humour and compassion with the victims, share an obsession for unsolved murder cases. There, too, the thrilling unravelling takes place of a murder from 1947, which Ellroy wrote a book about, featuring -- sometimes gruesome - photographs from the police archives. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)