Festival Season:
March 2025
THE ETERNAL SONG
Directors:
Writers:
Zaya Ralitza Benazzo, Maurizio Benazzo
Producers:
Zaya Ralitza Benazzo, Maurizio Benazzo, Finley Macneil
Run Time:
1:32:06
Awarded for the following Category(s):
Awarded Category(s)
"The Eternal Song" is a cinematic journey into landscapes of deep wounds, sacred remembrance, and ancestral wisdom. We're drawn into rich indigenous cultures, their roots intertwined with the land and spirits.
The film peels back many layers of the “modern” mindset that has severed our connection to nature, each other, and the ancestral realm with its hollow promises of salvation, progress, and development. Honoring the sacred dance of interdependence among all life forms we attune ourselves to the eternal song of existence and rediscover our belonging to the greater whole.
Submitter Statement
For two turning seasons of the earth, we journeyed into the heart of Indigenous lands. Our hearts opened to stories of pain and profound beauty, etched in soil and soul, in the eyes of elders and the laughter of children. "The Eternal Song" emerged from this pilgrimage—a witnessing of living histories, a tribute to the enduring spirit of Indigenous Peoples, an invocation of the sacred dance between all living things. It is our offering to a world thirsting for remembrance, a world that has forgotten its own heartbeat in the madness of modernity.
This film is a seed of transformation, a whisper of a future where the rhythms of the earth guide our steps. We invite viewers to wade through the depths of our collective past, to stem the tide of inherited trauma and carve new ways for collective healing. May we hear this eternal song as a bridge between worlds, a medicine for a fractured time, a call to remember the roots that bind us all and reimagine our place in the sacred web of life.
As we traveled these ancient lands, we were gifted with deep trust and ancestral wisdom. In humble reciprocity, we pledge half of the film's harvest back to the soil from which it grew—to nurture the dreams and visions of the communities who opened their hearts to us.
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.
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.
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 “The Wisdom Of Trauma”
They live, work and play on the unceded ancestral lands of the Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo, in Sebastopol, California.
Key Cast
Other Credits
Music: Armand Amar