Daniel Giambruno

Daniel Giambruno studied film directing at Florence's Istituto di Scienze Cinematografiche. He then pursued a communication degree at the Catholic University of Uruguay.

A career in television and advertising followed. However, the lack of an established professional film industry in Uruguay finally took him to Australia, where he still works in the Pay-TV industry as a promo director. In 1999 he founded New Dark Ages Pty. Ltd. in Sydney.

Thanks to the production of Twitch he was selected to attend the Berlinale Talent Campus in 2004.

During the last three years he has been given shape to his feature script The Rite and has produced his new short The New Life.

OFFICIAL SITE:
www.newdarkages.com

ABOUT THE NEW LIFE

New Dark Ages in association with MaddFilms present Salvatore Coco and Kaja Trøa in Daniel Giambruno’s latest short film The New Life.

The New Life is a supernatural story triggered by Dante Alighieri’s Vita Nova, albeit not an adaptation of said work. It is in fact a brief tale about guilt and delusion, which also offers a very different perspective on demonic possession.

Most films made about this subject tend to show us the victims and their symptoms from someone else's external point of view. The New Life challenges us to step inside instead.

A WORD FROM THE DIRECTOR

Familiar from an early age with Dante’s most famous works, it was only later in life that I discovered Vita Nova, and I was captivated by this great man’s creative commitment to his Muse. A commitment that is well known to those who have read The Divine Comedy but which however started much earlier in his life.

Reading Vita Nova after having read the The Divine Comedy is probably a richer experience than what an emerging Tuscan author could have ever imagined when Dante penned this brief collection of sonnets. The figure of Beatrice, the young woman whose premature death broke the heart and soul of a young man, is inevitably redefined by the knowledge of Dante’s later works, where he goes through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise to reach that same woman, whom he had turned into a symbol of glory and salvation.

Dante's commitment was for life and this sparked many questions inside me. One of those was: What would happen if such a strong Muse, capable of inspiring the biggest of poets, attracted instead the lust and obsession of a much darker being? Just imagine the endless amount of ideas that the search for an answer could trigger.

The New Life, the short film, is by no means an adaptation of Vita Nova. Dante can inspire you with the same passion that he was inspired by Beatrice, but I believe his works cannot be adapted to cinema literally. Art and film theorist Rudolph Arnheim said that what makes a masterpiece in a particular art form is precisely those elements, which cannot be transferred to another art form, and I agree.

The New Life is however, my way of creating within very limited material means, and with the generous help of a small bunch of good-hearted individuals, a film that hopefully will trigger similar questions to the ones that went through my mind after reading Vita Nova, and hopefully new ones too.