Steeplechase Films: Dante

FAIN: TR-264697-19

City Lore: NY Center for Urban Folk Culture (New York, NY 10003-9345)
Eric Burns (Project Director: August 2018 to present)

Production of a three-hour documentary film exploring the life and work of Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), author of The Divine Comedy.

DANTE is a three-part, three-hour documentary produced by Steeplechase Films and directed by Ric Burns for public television. The film chronicles the life of Dante Alighieri and his epic poem The Divine Comedy – inarguably one of the greatest literary masterpieces in history – comparable in power, range and sublimity only to the achievements of Homer and Shakespeare. The film explores both Dante the poet and Dante the pilgrim as he traverses literally through the realities of life and figuratively through the realms of the afterlife in the pages of what he called, simply, La Commedia. It aims to make this complicated masterpiece – composed in terza rima, a form Dante himself created – accessible to a wide-ranging, diverse audience across the globe, while also facing the perplexing question of what gets lost in translation. Dante can be seen as the founder of the modern Italian language and inventor of humanism, forever redefining religion, art, history, literature and culture.