Crazy Love

A love story stranger than fiction

Directed by Dan Klores

A deeply unsettling documentary that interrogates the nature of love and obsession through the true story of a man who violently disfigured his ex-girlfriend, only to marry her years later.

Filmmaker Dan Klores examines the strange love affair of Burt Pugach and Linda Riss. Pugach is a successful attorney in 1950s New York when he meets much-younger Riss. The pair date, but Riss breaks off contact with Pugach upon learning his claims of divorce are false. Discovering that Riss was engaged to another man, Pugach hires some men to throw lye in her face, and he serves 14 years in prison for the crime.