Original Film Title: RADIX 2
Director’s Name: Cristiano Leone
Writer’s Name: Cristiano Leone
Producer’s Name: CLProduction
Country of Origin: Italy
Country of Filming: Italy
Language: Spanish
Runtime: 6 minutes 12 seconds
Film Description:
RADIX, conceived and directed by Cristiano Leone, is an audio-visual project that promotes a dialogue between contemporary creation and historical heritage.
RADIX 2 stars the Basque choreographer and dancer Iratxe Ansa and the Italian dancer Igor Bacovich.
Through this artistic video, Iratxe Ansa and Igor Bacovich pay homage to the cultural heritage of two anti-fascist intellectuals, the Spanish poet of Italian origins Rafael Alberti and his wife, the writer Maria Teresa León.
Having fled Franco’s Spain, the Alberti’s arrived in Rome following a long period in exile. During their time in Rome, Rafael Alberti wrote the poetic anthology Roma, peligro para caminantes, while Maria Teresa León wrote her vibrant autobiography, Memoria de la Melancolía.
In the short movie, the dancers (couple in life and art, just like Alberti and León) recite some verses extracted from these two works, evoking both the severe pain of a life in exile and the hope for a new beginning in the city that had just welcomed them: Rome in the 1960s. Both città Eterna (Eternal city) and città Sparita (Vanished city), Rome in the 1960s is the fierce city depicted by Fellini, in which the excessive baroque architecture coexists with ruins covered with inscriptions of love and politics.
The soundtrack is conceived for the occasion by the Spanish composer Marc Álvarez, who pays tribute to the orchestral compositions of Ennio Morricone and Nino Rota, restoring a lifeline that connects ancient Rome to the tempo of the 1960s.
In RADIX 2, the Baths of Caracalla are not only a magnificent setting: they become protagonists of the video as the dancers, whose bodies blend with the spaces of the ancient Palestre, the Caldarium and the Frigidarium, spreading like shadows over the roman mosaics and reinhabiting the openings that once hosted majestic statues.
The words of Rafael Alberti and Maria Teresa León, evoked by the dancers within this setting, acquire a powerful symbolism. The Baths were built by the emperor Antonino Caracalla who in 212 AD issued the Constitutio Antoniana, an edict that granted Roman citizenship to all the inhabitants of the empire.
In a time of political crisis, marked in recent weeks by the tragedy of the Afghan exiles, RADIX 2 is a tribute to all the people who are forced to leave their country and to those who live a form of exile for having chosen to defend their ideals.