Nina Danino’s film on Maria Callas set for London screening

An experimental film by Gibraltarian Nina Danino that explores the transcendent presence of Maria Callas through archival recordings and newly shot footage will be screened in London later this month.

The film presents Callas in various operatic roles—Norma, Tosca, and Medea—constructing a hypnotic audiovisual tapestry that transforms her image into a cinematic iconostasis.

Through fragmented visuals and layered sound, MARIA seeks to capture the essence of Ms Callas as both an artist and a woman, embodying the emotional and spiritual power of her voice.

“The ecstatic experience of operatic drama, expressive gesture, opulence and despair, sacrifice and highly wrought scenes are extracted from existing footage. The piercing of the voice as it transcends the limits of the body creates for the viewer a landscape of emotion drawn around Maria Callas as a central icon around which the event of the film takes place,” said Ms Danino.

“In the roles for the woman’s voice, opera as the expression of suffering, what escapes suffering, what escapes language. They say that pitch evokes for us a highly charged, primordial cry from out of time, even the calls of animals and birds. It pierces with fury; it fills the theatre stage to resound with the operatic cry.”

“An impossible pitch which shatters the space of the opera stage. The gleaming bitter video of a new Medea whose archaic voice trembles in mid-air, an Oom Kalsoum of undulating wails, the voice of a popular diva of flowers and swirling train riding the waves on the floor of wooden studios with hammering feet.”

“A Lola Flores, that mixes in the airwaves with the TV footage, an Aida with pendulous earrings and pharaonic eye-liner.

MARIA was screened in Vienna on Tuesday and is set to be screened in London on February 28.
Following this screening Ms Danino will participate in a Q&A moderated by Rita Di Santo.

“Oh, Maria, what language do you speak? Oh, Maria Santissima how beautiful you are. An exalted art, an impossible voice. Oh, beautiful surface of the future image. Oh, image deified in the colour red."

"Oh reproduction and resurrection. Oh, recordings and re-recordings, subjected to treatments, to find the voice which resonates with the original lost one that each woman recreates again and again. Transverberates, transverberates. Mixing,” said Ms Danino about Ms Callas and the movie.

To book tickets to the London screening visit: https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/close-up-cinema/t-xmkdrre