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Our Comedy

The plot is inspired by The Divine Comedy, the masterwok of Italian poet Dante Alighieri, in the 700th anniversary of his death. In this modern elaboration, Dante’s Hell, Purgatory and Paradise are no longer the physical locations where humans’ souls gather after death, but rather the environment where humans experiment their free will during life.
At the film’s outset, God contemplates a beautiful landscape in the sunset light while a voice-over poetically describes his creation and explains humans’ desire to create works of art to mirror God’s creator activity.
In the sunrise, Dante runs in a thick wood, scared of animals barking; he trips and falls. Virgil, suddenly appearing, helps him up and leads him into a journey from which Dante will gain a new awareness.
Dante and Virgil are now in front of a degraded neighborhood. As Virgil explains, this is the Hell that humans have built for themselves, by spreading hatred and suppressing hope.
Next, Dante and Virgil find themselves in a trafficked road. Virgil explains to a puzzled Dante that that place and day, ordinary as it is, is the Purgatory, where humans experiment their free will and continuously choose between bravery and cowardice. Dante and Virgil are now in a narrow alley in the dark, the place of the un-seen ones, those that get lost just because others do not manage to see them.
A sudden, dazzling light brings Dante in front of his muse, Beatrice, who is smiling in a beautiful landscape with a waterfall in the background. Beatrice explains to a touched Dante that the Paradise is where humans live up to themselves by creating hope and beauty. Beatrice’s words characterize the Paradise as the realization of humans’ creator nature, which is what defines them as “made in God’s image”.

  • Patrizia Genovesi
    Director
  • Patrizia Genovesi
    Writer
  • Libera Università del Cinema
    Producer
  • Alberto Caneva
    Key Cast
    "Virgil"
  • Leonardo Caneva
    Key Cast
    "Dante"
  • Sanja Jelena Gargano
    Key Cast
    "Beatrice"
  • Alberto Angrisano
    Key Cast
    "Voice-over"
  • Angelo Tarquini
    Key Cast
    "God"
  • Jessica Giaconi
    Photography
  • Patrizia Genovesi
    Photography
    E' stato solo un click
  • Project Title (Original Language):
    La Nostra Commedia
  • Project Type:
    Short
  • Runtime:
    5 minutes 27 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    May 31, 2021
  • Country of Origin:
    Italy
  • Country of Filming:
    Italy
  • Language:
    Italian
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • ContestEco
    Roma
    Italy
    Roma premiere
    Official selection - award still to be assigned
Director Biography - Patrizia Genovesi

Patrizia Genovesi, born in 1962, is an Italian professional photographer, video-artist and screenwriter with a significant track record of solo and collective exhibitions both in Italy and abroad. Her works cover a variety of subjects and styles inspired by her eclectic abilities that include drawing and painting from the Italian tradition, music execution and composition, and mastering digital photography technology. Her production can hardly be classified within any given artistic trend as it ranges from black-and-white to over-saturated color and includes portraits, landscapes, architecture, street photography, light painting, film and opera backstage, and other genres.

Genovesi teaches photography and cinema photography, the latter with the Libera Università del Cinema (Free University of Cinema) in Rome, and is active as a lecturer in conferences and seminars on photography, painting, and film photography cooperating with Roma Tre University in Rome.

La Nostra Commedia is Genovesi’s first official work as a film director.

Website: www.patriziagenovesi.com
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrizia_Genovesi

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Director Statement

Dealing with Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, with its massive influence on the political and religious thought of the last centuries, was not an easy task. My producer, the Libera Università del Cinema, added to the challenge by asking me for a very short film (5 minutes), as it believes in the effectiveness of this genre’s concise, emotional, and direct narrative style.

In Dante’s profoundly religious vision, humans’ destiny is the result of God’s thought and humans’ conscious collaboration, and implies the objective to transcend the logic of the pure matter – where relationships are based on force – and move to the superior level which is the law of love, the only capable of unleashing humans’ creator ability which directly descends from God’s nature. Humans are then revealed their real nature, which is relationship. Without this they cannot achieve happiness nor, ultimately, exist.

I wanted to provide a modern interpretation of Dante’s thoughts. We are the universe’s living instant and have the liberty to create and shape our habitat of values and emotions for ourselves and others. In my film, Dante’s Hell, Purgatory and Paradise become the environment of humans’ daily life, where they experiment their free will and their creative potential for the good or the evil. The film opens with a monologue synthetizing the relation between God creator of humans and humans creators of art, and this thread gets picked up again in the very last frames, where Beatrice identifies the Paradise as the location (or rather, the time) where humans create hope and beauty.

I devoted significant time and effort to script and screenplay writing, to make sure that every word was up to my objective. Also, I paid strong attention to settings, photography, and soundtrack so that they were not simple “background” but were clearly characterized in consistency with the action for an effective and emotionally impactful result.