Directed by Zaya Benazzo & Maurizio Benazzo. 1h 15min (Disqualified: No screener was provided by the submitter\/filmmakers).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Zaya Benazzo is a filmmaker from Bulgaria with degrees in engineering, environmental science, and film. For many years, she worked as an environmental activist in Holland and Bulgaria, and later produced and directed several award-winning documentaries in Europe and the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Maurizio Benazzo grew up in Italy, and in 1984 came to the United States on a ninety-eight-year-old sailing boat. He started working as an actor, model, and filmmaker, but his thirst for knowledge was only satisfied in 2001 upon encountering I Am That, the seminal work by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, while he was in India shooting the award-winning documentary Short Cut to Nirvana.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Maurizio and Zaya merged their lifelong passions for science and mysticism when they met in 2007, and their first project together was filming the documentary Rays of the Absolute on the life and teachings of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj. This project sparked their next level of creation and collaboration: SAND, a global community inspired by the timeless wisdom traditions, informed by modern science, and grounded in direct experience. In 2018 they met Gabor Mate and decided to make a film about him which led to the highly acclaimed \u201cThe Wisdom Of Trauma\u201d as well as “Where Olive Trees Weep.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They live, work and play on the unceded ancestral lands of the Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo, in Sebastopol, California.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Director Statement<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In The Circle of Life is one of 12 films we made after traving for two years into the heart of Indigenous lands and communities, collecting testimonies on the impact of colonization and the healing of those deep scars. Our hearts were shattered and remade from witnessing landscapes of deep suffering and resilient beauty. The Eternal Song: Wisdom of the Ancestors series emerged from this pilgrimage, a tribute to the enduring spirit of Indigenous Peoples and an incantation to the sacred interconnection between all beings. It is an offering to a world enveloped in historical amnesia, numbed to its own heartbeat by the madness of modernity.
Weaving together Indigenous voices across generations and communities, the documentary uses storytelling as a conduit for ancestral wisdom. It is a prayer for collective remembering, an invocation to the rhythms of the Earth. We invite you to wade through the depths of our collective past, to grapple with historical traumas, and imagine pathways to collective healing.
May this Eternal Song offer medicine for our fractured times and help us reimagine our place in the sacred web of life.
In humble reciprocity, we pledge half of the film’s harvest back to the soil from which it grew\u2014to nurture the dreams and visions of the communities who opened their hearts to us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"