In four extended sequences, The First Risk confronts the murder of Matthew Shepard and the myth of Venus and Adonis through the eyes of Italian Renaissance painter Luca Cambiaso; the eccentric women of Pedro Almodovar's All About My Mother and their search for authenticity; the nature of love and obsession in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and the pain and confusion of loss; and "The Strange Case of Maribel Dixon," the compelling novella-in-verse of a physicist in search of his lost wife, haunted by a phantom voice that may or may not be hers...