Nelo Risi

Life and death of the poet Arthur Rimbaud and his troubled relationship with the poet Paul Verlaine until the African adventure in Ethiopia. (Wikipedia)

Nelo Risi's "Dead of Summer" is the story of one woman's rather too elegant (for my tastes) descent into lunacy, set in midsummer, mostly in a dazzlingly chic modern apartment that is isolated in the same, exotic North African landscape in which André Gide's "Immoralist" found liberation and Paul Bowles's existential bank teller attained swift, sweet nothingness. [...] -VINCENT CANBY, New York Times, March 10, 1971 (Vincent Canby, New York Times)

In rural Yugoslavia, Lenka (Chaplin) lives with her blind brother, Miscia (Scrobogna). They were orphaned of their Greek Orthodox mother and their Jewish father, Rasco (Gavric) is believed to have been killed in the war. As the Second World War continues to rage and fascism activity blights Europe, Lenka and her brother becoming increasingly vulnerable targets to anti-semitic sentiment. She finds support in Ivan (Castelnuovo), a partisan in love with her.