"Between Forest and Stars": the encounters of Dante in the Boboli Gardens become a feature film!

March 25 is the day that the Ministry of Culture established, in 2020, as a day dedicated to the celebration of the work and thought of the extraordinary figure of Dante Alighieri. On this occasion, promoted by the media as "Dante's Day", the Department of Digital Strategies of the Uffizi Galleries has published the full-length feature film of the journey of Dante's Divine Comedy in the Boboli Gardens. "Between Forest and Stars" - such is the title of the feature film - is the video of the homonymous show produced by the Uffizi Galleries in collaboration with Archètipo Association and staged, with the patronage of the Ministry, on 6 September 2021 as one of the celebrations of the 700th anniversary of Dante's death.

From that show, which had the purpose of reinterpreting in a contemporary key the sense of Dante's journey between Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, a video was drawn according to an equally contemporary key, no less fascinating than the theatrical staging. The shootings, editing and post-production interventions by Federica Toci have succeeded in grasping and enhancing the suggestions that the show director Riccardo Massai had specifically thought up for the spaces of the Boboli Gardens, which for one day became the ideal meeting place between art, nature and literature. They in fact hosted the re-enactment of the journey "from hardship top the stars" of Dante and, metaphorically, of all mankind that, through his eyes, manages to see and confront vis-à-vis first with evil - by condemning it yet being charmed by it - then with the wonderfully fragile dimension of a humanity capable of rethinking itself and its faults, to grasp, through contemplation (also of nature) and knowledge, the Supreme and Ultimate Good, higher and higher, more and more evanescent, ever more abstract , like language that as man approaches the Truth becomes more rarefied, unable to express itself fully.

The video "Between Forest and Stars" retraces the sense of this journey, mediated by an expressive medium other than theatrical - the eye of the camera and a "cinematographic" language tell a story differently - which is nevertheless capable of capturing and enhancing the essence of the itinerant performance that succeeded in blending the places of the literary text and Dante's tercets with the ever-changing suggestions of the natural places of the Boboli Gardens, which have now become gloomy infernal ravines, now steep Purgatory routes of atonement, now abstract celestial vision.

Have fun!