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Alain Danielou – Il labirinto di una vita

From September 15th to September 17th 2017, Il Cinema la Compagnia di Firenze hosts the tenth edition of Immagini & Suoni del Mondo – Festival del Film Etnomusicale, an ethnomusic film festival promoted by Multi Culti. An insight on 10 feature films and documentary films written by indipendent filmmakers. Each movie with a different story to tell about a different part of the world. The focus of the festival is the musical hybridization between tradition and contemporaneity, globalization and localization, folk and electro music, indigenous and urban, in a context where boundaries and definitions tend to lose meaning. Some stories are real based ones and they try to retrace music maps of countries or entire continents, others are biopics which tell the life and work of musicians and musicologists, others are very intimate music poems.
The closing night, Sunday 17th, will be entirely dedicated to India with film screening and live music, in collaboration with the River to River Festival. Riccardo Biadene’s documentary film ALAIN DANIELOU – IL LABIRINTO DI UNA VITA (h.21.00), tells the extraordinary life of the famous French writer and musicologist Alain Danielou (1907-1994), who lived in India from 1936 to 1958. On his return in 1961, Daniélou founded and directed the International Institute for Traditional Music Studies (IITM) in Berlin where he continued to record the first collection of World Music for UNESCO. Indian music, dance, religion and tradition in comparison with modernity, sculpture and philosophy are the themes explored in this documentary through the eyes and autobiography of Daniélou himself, with a particular focus on traditional Indian music .
After the screening, the two dancers Marianna Biadene and Atmananda present the show « NATARAJA, tribute to the dancing God » a selection of original choreographies inspired by the traditional repertoire of the classic dances of southern India: bharatanatyam and kuchipudi. Through the dance, music and narrative (and in relation to Alain Danielou’s biography), the show explores the many aspects of the divinity Shiva Nataraja, Lord of Dance.

With the extraordinary participation of the tabla player Sanjay Kansa Banik, a member of the Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio, about whom the documentary film A Journey on Tabla has just been released.