Inferno to paradise: Filmmaker Ric Burns dives into the world of Dante through 'Divine Comedy'

Apr. 9—For a long time, Ric Burns thought he was going to be a professor of literature.

Then he followed his brother, Ken, into filmmaking.

Burns began his latest project, "Dante: Inferno to Paradise," more than eight years ago. It premiered on PBS with a broadcast and is currently streaming on the PBS app.

"I started the incredible journey and it's been transformative for me," Burns says. "The story is so dramatic."

The two-part, four-hour film explores the life, work and legacy of the great 14th century Florentine poet Dante Alighieri, and the epic masterpiece he left behind, "The Divine Comedy," one of the greatest achievements in the history of Western literature. Burns says no film of this kind exists, making Dante's incomparable achievement come alive for a worldwide English-speaking audience.

He wanted to explore the hypnotically beautiful 14,233-line poem — in which crucial issues of politics, power, corruption, sin, violence, virtue, beauty, love, humility and compassion mingle and converge — the film addresses universal human questions at once timeless and urgently relevant to our own time: questions of morality and truth, life and death, the love of family and children, the love of country, the belief in something larger than oneself, the love of God.

An extraordinary group of scholars and actors — from Italy, France, Britain and the United States — collaborated with Burns over the course of the last seven years in the making of this unprecedented film.

The series is narrated by Alan Cox and includes dramatic performances by Antonio Fazzini (Dante), Fattori Fraser (Beatrice), Dikran Tulaine (Virgil), and Cox (Boccaccio), among many others.

Burns includes interviews with Riccardo Bruscagli (University of Florence); Lino Pertile (Harvard); Elena Lombardi (Oxford); Heather Webb (Cambridge); Catherine Adoyo (George Washington); Theodore Cachey (Notre Dame); Manuele Gragnolati (Sorbonne); Teodolinda Barolini (Columbia); David Quint (Yale); Rev. Timothy Verdon (Museo dell'Opera del Duomo); Giuseppe Ledda (Bologna); Claudio Giunta (independent historian); Guy Raffa (University of Texas); and Albert Ascoli (Berkeley); among others.

Burns and Bruscagli worked together on the film, as it was conceived by the two.

"Why should we care about Dante Alighieri?" Bruscagli asks in the film. "Because Dante addresses the core of our humanity. Dante had the ambition of embracing everything — of embracing the sense of us being humans on this planet. What you immediately understand reading 'The Divine Comedy' is that, 'Okay, that was the life of Dante Alighieri, 700 years ago.' But the message is: Your life matters. Take care of it; take care of it — your life matters."

Burns says Dante wrote at a moment not unlike our own of tremendous upheaval, crisis, doubt and change — a world beset from without and within with greed, corruption, factionalism and violence — in which every aspect of the moral, political, social, religious and economic order seemed to be breaking apart.

"Seeking to change his readers and save the world, he created a poem that embraced every aspect of the learning of his time — addressing universal questions relevant to this day. What is justice? What is love? How can we live a moral life? How can we heal ourselves and the world?" Burns says. "Committed to a breathtakingly egalitarian vision that placed women on an equal footing with men, and determined to communicate to the widest possible audience — men and women, young and old, high-born and low, literate and unlearned — he wrote in a form of vernacular Florentine that became the Italian language itself. Our intention in creating the film has been to follow Dante's lead, wherever possible, at every turn, using the lingua franca of our own global times — film, visual media and the English language."