The Author
Katherine Diane Schimmel
Writer
A writer drawn to the invisible, and what the world walks past.
Katherine Diane Schimmel · Writer
The Life
A researcher who writes, a writer who listens
Katherine Diane Schimmel is a researcher, writer, and musician whose work keeps circling the same question: how meaning survives in the things we make and the things we lose. Her projects divide, roughly, in two — the analytical study of paintings, and work related to sound and music. She is drawn less to conclusions than to attention: the slow looking a canvas asks for, the way a phrase of music can hold a room. Passionate about art and the creative process, she writes to shift a reader’s perspective and reveal what ordinary hours tend to hide.
Collaboration
With pioneers across the sciences and the arts, in pursuit of the creative process at greater depth.
Literary series
Host of a popular series at an award- winning literary magazine.
In print
Published articles across journals, technical magazines, and books.
Advocacy
A long-time advocate for human rights, animal and environmental welfare, and the preservation of cultural heritage.
Two rooms
How the work divides — and where it meets
I
The painted & the played
Atmosphere study
One room is quiet and close: pigment under raking light, the anatomy of a single canvas, the forensic analysis of a note allowed to decay. Here she studies old paintings waiting to be understood like some far off sound that inspires feeling and then turns into song.
II
The filmed & the remembered
Atmosphere study
The other room opens outward: a story told in Italian, on location, a monument that has stood through more than one war. Here she writes — cinema as an act of cultural memory, assembled from the fragments others let go.
Where it began
The monument, and what it overheard
Long before it was a screenplay, it was a habit: standing before the monument to Dante in the Piazza di Santa Croce, and beginning, quietly, to talk. Dinner with Dante grew from those conversations — Katherine’s own, more limited than her protagonist’s — woven together with fragments of stories she had heard about Florence in the early years after the Second World War.
Although the woman at the center of the story is fictional, her story is a million stories in one.
A cinematic study — the monument to Dante, Piazza di Santa Croce
On the record
Elsewhere, and what comes next
Dinner with Dante marks Katherine’s screenplay debut — and her debut on the international film festival circuit.
Stage 32
On the record
Stay tuned for Venice Film Festival updates!
The Director
Cecilia Miniucchi
Director
Cecilia Miniucchi, director, was born in Italy and educated in the United States. She worked alongside Lina Wertmüller and at Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios. With Expired she was nominated for the “Camera d’Or” at Cannes, and went on to direct acclaimed films such as Life Upside Down, which premiered in Venice.
Her recent feature No Place like Rome won two Kinéo Awards, while I Love Amsterdam… and You is ready for the festival circuit. She created the TV series Off the Walls, starring Keanu Reeves along with an international cast, and has just completed Dinner with Dante, filmed onsite in Florence, Italy.
Beyond cinema, she has directed award-winning documentaries and music videos, collaborating with world renown artists. Also a writer and photographer, she has published several books and exhibited internationally.
Cecilia Miniucchi · Director
Enzo De Rosa · Composer
The Composer
Enzo De Rosa
Composer
Enzo De Rosa is an Italian-Canadian composer, pianist and arranger. Born in Naples, he began studying piano at a young age and developed a professional life that joins classical training with composition, orchestration, recording and contemporary production techniques.
His work has taken him through Europe, the Middle East and North America, both as a performer and as a composer for film, television, theatre, opera and recordings. He has appeared in recital, concerto and chamber-music settings while continuing to develop an extensive catalogue of original music.
De Rosa also taught at the Conservatory of Music in Benevento, Italy, including composition, the history and analysis of film music and work with virtual orchestral tools. He is now based in Montréal, where he continues his activity in screen music, concert performance, arranging and production.
Behind the Music
How Enzo and Katherine Used Humming as a Metaphorical Device in Dinner with Dante
Throughout the entire soundtrack, Katherine’s voice may be heard humming or singing with open or closed vowels. Sometimes accompanied by the viola (played heartbreakingly breathy and vulnerable by Armand Priftuli), or fleetingly with the piano played by De Rosa, the decision to use a purely instrumental approach to singing was a deliberate choice by the composer, the writer and the filmmaker. Since the protagonist (Gaia Bottazzi) suffered from long-term trauma and was unable to psychologically move on in life, all three felt that humming could represent not only the quiet monologue she had with Dante but could also come to symbolize the lost or stunted voices of all victims of war and trauma. Ironically, singing and humming moves energy through the body and so could (with medical guidance) perhaps offer a way to help restore emotional and physical balance.
Stay tuned for Katherine and Enzo’s upcoming album, which will feature uncut songs from the soundtrack along with original compositions related to the theme.
Her hope
When asked what she wants the film accomplish, her answer is simple.
“
That it might change a single life for the better — that someone will feel a little less alone, or be reminded that comfort can arrive in the least expected places.
A note before you go
If any of this has stayed with you, I would like to hear from you — a question, a memory of Florence, or simply word that the story found its way to you. The film arrives in 2026; you are warmly welcome to follow it here.
— Katherine Diane Schimmel