Her life unspools in black and white: a stark landscape drained of blood. On an island in a cold northern sea, a woman is waiting for god, moonlight washing over her nightgown in the cobalt hours before dawn. The music wells, a single aching thread of Bach on which she dangles, suspended between one world and another. Defiant, Arachne waited for the goddess: It was her own incomparable skill that gave art to her spinning and weaving, not a gift of the immortals. Athena could meet her challenge if she chose. Waiting among the whisperers, the planes of their faces brilliant with light. Watching and waiting among packages wrapped up tight, poised in the shadows on the upholstered seat, her long legs crossed beneath her, her slender arms folded into her winter coat.

The film threads through the teeth of the projector, framing a longing for god, for a pure and selfless love, for a meaning behind this mortal torment. A father and a husband argue in a boat, dead in the water—whose love is more flawed? The husband impotent against his wife’s anguish, or the father watching?

Side by side, Arachne and the patroness of weavers threaded their looms, stringing their warps between the heddles, wrapping weft thread on the bobbins of their shuttles, buttoning their mantles beneath their breasts to free their arms as they worked. They wove swiftly, sweat rising on their brows, ribs resting on their looms’ breast beams, beaters keeping pace, their concentration complete. Athena’s tapestry was impeccable, designed to humble the haughty girl: above the city of Athens, the gods dazzled on their Olympian thrones, winged Nike victorious at their center, the whole encircled by graceful, leafing branches of Athena’s symbol, the olive. But into each of the four corners of the fabric she wove a cautionary tale—the story of a mortal whose pride had offended the gods, and the fate each had suffered as a result.