smelling criminals

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, born in the stench of 18th century Paris, develops a superior olfactory sense, which he uses to create the world's finest perfumes. However, his work takes a dark turn as he tries to preserve scents in the search for the ultimate perfume.

An army cadet accompanies an irascible, blind captain on a week-long trip from Turin to Naples.

Charlie Simms is a student at a private preparatory school who comes from a poor family. To earn the money for his flight home to Gresham, Oregon for Christmas, Charlie takes a job over Thanksgiving looking after retired U.S. Army officer Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade, a cantankerous middle-aged man who lives with his niece and her family.

A consultant who has a superhuman sense of smell and assists in solving cases by smelling the scents left behind at crime scenes. He usually lives with a nasal plug, but once he removes it, and takes one sniff with his keen sense of smell, he will know the person’s age, gender, what he or she ate and even lifestyle. Besides investigating cases, he is researching whether people’s emotions have scent too. He has a daughter with Katayama Megumi.

The scent trail as an evidentiary method in criminal proceedings was invented in the USSR and subsequently developed by the East German secret police and widely used against opponents of the regime. Since the 1980s, it has become a common part of police and judicial practice, even in the post-communist Czech Republic. Zuzana Piussi's latest film continues the director's investigative work dealing with the problematic construction of reality and dead ends in Central European justice. It follows the fate of people who seek retrials of unfair court proceedings and, in the wake of this, asks whether the method of proving the presence of a person at a crime scene based on the scent detected by a dog is really impartial or how it is possible that a scent trail is often sufficient as the only evidence to convict suspects, even though it is questioned by scientists.

An extraordinary sense of smell gives a crime investigator unique insight into solving mysteries, but his gift takes a toll on his personal life.

When a singer is found murdered, with her scent glands excised from her body, detectives probe a group of friends who attended boarding school with her.