The Embassy of Italy in Rabat and the Italian Cultural Institute of Rabat are taking part in the Marrakech Short Film Festival with ‘Babal’, to be screened on 23 September.
The short film directed by Teodora Pampaloni was filmed during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic when, suddenly, frenetic and globalized humanity came to a halt.
‘Babal’, taking inspiration from the biblical episode of the Tower of Babel, is an evocative representation of this period of the COVID-19 pandemic and seeks to answer the question ‘Do languages unite people or divide them?’, reaching the conclusion that music is the only universal language.
Teodora Pampaloni was born in Florence and lived between Cape Town and London, where she studied Social Anthropology. She holds a master’s degree in documentary cinema from Tel Aviv University. She says:
The film is in Esperanto, a language created to become ecumenical, therefore to return to a Babel that grows and rises from territorial conflicts of possession and power, like a hyperbole in a constant state of becoming towards the divine. The short is divided into five phases of a dream: the lost paradise in which humanity is divided by the word, the pandemic, the period of quarantine in an imaginary place where human stereotypes coexist without speaking; then they go back to talking and arguing; the last phase is the elevation of these stereotypes which takes place through the music (universal language) that carries them to the top of the tower.
For more information, go to: iicrabat.esteri.it.
