a hook but no fish explores the lingua ignota (unknown language) received by the twelfth-century German mystic Hildegard von Bingen. The film begins at Disibodenberg in Germany, the site of the monastery where the child Von Bingen was given as a tithe and interned with two other women. The film moves from Hildegard’s place of internment, where she first began to write, to the desktop of an unknown narrator, to the living room of a flat, to a farmhouse, to scenes of birds swarming and roaming thr...