Dante’s Labyrinth Film Trailer: The Race Against Erasure

A filmmaker’s encounter with a man who seemed larger than life and dangerously close to disappearing.

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I did not set out to make a film about politics.

I set out to understand a person.

I met David De Hannay in New York in 2022 at an exhibition he curated in support of Ukraine. The room was filled with artists, conversations, and optimism, yet the man at the center of it all seemed to carry a different reality.

Looking back, I realize he was, in many ways, standing at the edge of life.

I often think of Oriana Fallaci’s A Man, which begins not with a biography but with a funeral. A life already suspended between memory and disappearance. That image stayed with me because when I met David, he appeared exhausted by decades of conflict, exile, persecution, and survival.

Born in Iran and later becoming an American citizen, David first picked up a camera as a young artist determined to document the world around him. His photography and human rights work eventually led to his imprisonment as a political prisoner in Iran, but neither prison nor exile ended his creative journey. They became part of it.

What intrigued me was not politics.

It was the man.

Like the figures that fascinated Oriana Fallaci, David seemed larger than life and yet profoundly human at the same time. He possessed an unusual combination of sensitivity and strength. He could spend hours speaking about poetry, art, or suffering, and then display a level of determination that seemed almost impossible to break.

He was uncompromising.

Not in the sense of ideology, but in his refusal to surrender his convictions, his curiosity, or his freedom of thought.

When I met him, I felt I was encountering someone who had spent his entire life paying the price for remaining true to himself.

And yet, paradoxically, he also seemed close to disappearing.

Not only because parts of his archive had been damaged, lost, or neglected, but because the story of his life itself was slipping away. Here was a man who had spent decades documenting others, helping artists, defending human rights, creating films, photographs, books, and movements — yet much of that history remained scattered, vulnerable, and largely undocumented.

Shortly after we met, David began filming Libre Monijara, a documentary about my own artistic journey. As an artist, I found myself on the other side of the camera.

Over time, I realized that documenting the lives of others was something he had been doing for decades. Through NYC Art Movement and countless independent projects, he gave artists opportunities, visibility, and a voice when few others would.

I became one of those artists.

He helped preserve my story.

As Libre Monijara evolved, I became increasingly curious about the person behind the camera. The more I learned, the more I realized that very few people were documenting his own life.

So I picked up a camera.

He had filmed my story.

Now I felt compelled to film his.

Built from archival material dating back to 1999, Dante’s Labyrinth follows a body of work spanning photography, films, books, performances, and conceptual art created across multiple countries and decades. Much of the material emerged from personal archives and from behind-the-scenes footage gathered while David was documenting my own work.

The deeper I went into the project, the more I felt I was racing against erasure.

And I still am.

Not only to preserve an archive, but to preserve the voice behind it — a voice that prison could not silence, exile could not extinguish, and time should not be allowed to erase.

Then history entered the film.

While I was filming Dante’s Labyrinth, the mass killing of protesters in Iran unfolded. David followed the events closely, receiving footage, testimonies, and reports from people connected to the tragedy. I watched him experience it not as a distant observer, but as someone whose own life had been shaped by the same forces decades earlier.

One day he told me:

“When an Iranian falls under a bullet, the wound passes through my own body.”

It was then that I understood something important.

This was no longer only a film about preserving an artist’s archive.

I began to understand why people had spent so many years trying to erase him. Not because of a photograph. Not because of a painting. Not because of a film.

They feared the possibility that he might become a voice.

And I realized that part of my responsibility as a filmmaker was to help protect that voice.

Today, what remains at risk is not only an artistic archive. It is also the memory of a life and a body of work that continue to face pressures from many of the same forces that once imprisoned and persecuted him. The forms may change, but the attempt to silence independent voices remains remarkably consistent.

As a Colombian-American artist and filmmaker, I believe independent voices matter. This film became a dialogue between two artists from different worlds connected by a shared belief that art can preserve what history tries to erase.

Some films are made to tell a story.

Others are made because something valuable is at risk of disappearing.

Dante’s Labyrinth became both.

It is a film about an artist. But it is also an attempt to preserve a voice, a body of work, and the memory of a life that history has repeatedly tried to erase.

Monica Jaramillo (Monijara) Artist, Filmmaker, and Director of Dante’s Labyrinth