On the occasion of the seven hundredth anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death, the Italian Cultural Institute of Beirut, in partnership with the Beirut Art Film Festival (BAFF), presents a series of eight meetings dedicated to the Supreme Poet, including poetry, art, cinema and music.
The appointments will be held from 14 to 26 September 2021, both in-person and streamed online.
Programme:
- 14 September: ‘Dall’Inferno al Paradiso, attraverso la poesia e l’art’ (From Inferno to Paradise, Through Poetry and Art) Dialogue between Giuseppe Rizzo, art historian, and Diane de Selliers, who published ‘Dante’s Divine Comedy illustrated by Botticelli’ in Paris in 1996. Meeting in Italian, with simultaneous translation into French.
- 15 September and 16 September: ‘Dante e Beatrice : una lauda spirituala italo-levantina’ (Dante and Beatrice: an Italo-Levantine Spiritual Lauda). Nidaa Abou Mrad, dean of the Faculty of Music and Musicology at the Université Antonine, offers a world premiere musical setting of excerpts from the Commedia and the verses by Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī, one of the poets who inspired Dante. An Italian-Levantine spiritual lauda, performed by the medieval music ensemble of the Antonine University.
- 17 September: poetry, theatre and music with Cesare Capitani, an Italian-French actor who will read passages from the Divine Comedy in both languages, accompanied by Ghassan Sahhab, a qānūn player (medieval zither).
- 21 September: screening of Ralph Loop’s ‘Botticelli – Inferno’. A 2016 documentary dedicated to Botticelli’s drawings inspired by the Divine Comedy. In English, with French subtitles.
- 22 September: screening of ‘Dante — Qu’est-ce que la Divine Comédie?’ (Dante – What is the Divine Comedy?) by Thierry Thomas. A 2006 documentary dedicated to Dante’s Inferno, with precious comments from Jacqueline Risset, translator of the Commedia into French.
- 24 September: screening of three films (‘Niemeyer 4 Ever’; ‘Une Ville et une femme’; ‘Inferno, lettre à Lara’) by by Nicolas Khoury , which deal with the Lebanese people’s descent into the underworld, including architecture, dance, literature and art. The screening will be followed by a discussion between Nicolas Khoury and Alice Mogabgab, the producer of the three films.
- 26 September: Arab culture in the Divine Comedy. A debate between Francesca Maria Corrao, Professor of Arabic Language and Culture at the LUISS University of Rome, and Abdo Wazen, a Lebanese poet and critic, on the influence of medieval Arabic culture on Dante, and on the development of the poem.
The meetings are free of charge, with reservations required.
For more information, see beirutartfilmfestival.org and iicbeirut.esteri.it
