The New Life is a supernatural story triggered by Dante Alighieri’s La Vita Nuova, 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.

Reading La Vita Nuova 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 La Vita Nuova. 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 La Vita Nuova, and hopefully new ones too.