DE, CH 2024 | Director, screenplay: Anja Dreschke, Michaela Schäuble | Camera, editing: Anja Dreschke | Archive research, additional camera: Michaela Schäuble | Music, field recording, sonification: Carlo Peters | Narrator: Birgit Minichmayr | Colour and b/w | DCP | 105 min | italian, german, english OV with english SUB

Apulia, 1959: Women in white dresses dance ecstatically in a small chapel. They jump, spin in circles, roll on the floor; some even climb onto the altar. It is said that they suffered from a poisonous spider bite and had to beg Saint Paul to heal them. Images of this “dancing frenzy”, which requires ritual exorcism with music, inspired Italian anthropologists to travel to southern Italy. TARANTISM REVISITED follows the extensive archival records of these research trips and visits the places and landscapes where they originated. This cinematic quest is framed by the unique correspondence between anthropologist Annabella Rossi and Michela Margiotta, alias Anna, a “tarantata”. By interweaving images and voices from the past with the present, this essayistic documentary film examines the complex history and diverse forms in which tarantism continues to live on today. (Verena Mund)

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