The Conductor

Leonard Bernstein’s protégée Marin Alsop reveals how she smashed the glass ceiling to become an internationally renowned conductor.

2021-06-10 | en

Hail Bop! A Portrait of John Adams

Shot over the course of a year, this intimate portrait of provocative composer John Adams presents scenes of the artist at work and at play against the backdrop of dramatic American landscapes that reflect the themes of his music. Though he has a number of credits to his name, Adams is best known for his unconventional opera "Nixon in China," which explores the former U.S. president's meeting with Mao Zedong in 1972.

2006-01-01 | en

Philip Glass: Looking Glass

This documentary captures the overflowing energy and activity of one today's greatest composers, Philip Glass, and allows us to follow him from New York to London and from Paris to Boston. He speaks about his beginnings, his moving to Paris for two years of intensive study with Nadia Boulanger, his meeting with Indian musician Ravi Shankar and director Robert Wilson, who had a deep influence on his career. The film also shows him at work on the last details of his opera The Sound of a Voice, directed by Robert Woodruff and conducted by Alan Johnson. Éric Darmon's camera, with its poetic shots and original framings, takes us for a musical journey into seven months of the life of the composer who, rising from the underground scene of the seventies, brought on a revolution in modern theater.

2005-01-01 | en

Accept

2016-06-01 | cs

Choreography for a Camera and Dancers

The first experimental dance film from Croatia, which pays homage to the pioneer of experimental and dance film Maya Deren and her "Study in Choreography for Camera" from 1945. The theme of the film is inspired by a composition by Ivo Malec "Miniatures for Lewis Carroll", and the dance is performed by the members of the Studio for Contemporary Dance who, in black suits and white surroundings, seem to float in the space captured by the eye of the camera.

1968-02-27 | sh

The Lost Paradise

He is the most performed contemporary composer in the world. And yet he rarely ventures out in public, prefers to keep quiet about his music, feels at home in the forests of Estonia and generates therewith - perhaps involuntarily - the impression of a recluse, which is attributed to him again and again: Arvo Part. In The Lost Paradise, we follow him over a period of one year in his native Estonia, to Japan and the Vatican. The documentary is framed by the stage production of Adam's Passion, a music theater piece based on the Biblical story of the fall of Adam featuring three key works by Arvo Part. The world-renowned director Robert Wilson has brought this work to the stage in a former submarine factory in Tallinn. Tracing their creative process, the film offers rare and personal insights into the worlds of two of the most fascinating personalities in the international arts and music scene.

2015-09-08 | en

A Shape of Time - the composer Jo Kondo

Jo Kondo (*1947) is one of the most interesting composers of contemporary music in Japan. His music is composed intuitively and at the same time it is highly abstract. Without clear directionality and at the same time not without form. For a Japanese audience it sounds “Western” and in the West it is regarded “Japanese”. A music in between categories. Like Kondo’s music the film is shifting between places and directions: a concert in the Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam, an elaborate sushi bar in Tokyo, a CD-production in a Cologne radio station, the Zuisenji temple in Kondo’s neighborhood in Kamakura. Kondo wants his music to appear “normal”, without spectacular surface or narrative elements. A concept of “normality” you may also find in the films of Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, who – like Kondo – spent most of his life in Kamakura.

2016-03-18 | en

SYNCHRONOUS

SYNCHRONOUS is an intimate portrait of love and the reverse side of love: mourning. The granddaughter/maker looks idealistically at the endless love between her grandfather and grandmother. When her grandfather dies, she decides to look for answers by filming her grandmother. What happens when you've been together all your life and your great love dies? Where is the love then?

2022-04-01 | nl

Knots and Fields

Knots and Fields examines the aesthetic debates and tensions that have animated the Darmstadt courses over six decades, exploring their relevance today in an increasingly globalised environment.

2010-01-01 | en

Half Elf

A lighthouse keeper prepares his earthly funeral while trying to reconnect with his inner elf. Hulda and Trausti have shared a roof on the Icelandic coast for over seventy years. Her love of books is matched by his love of stones. When he tells her he wants to change his name to Elf she warns him that the family will reject him. Now, as his one hundredth birthday nears and Trausti senses the hand of death upon him, he is searching for an elf’s coffin…

2020-09-19 | is

The Fire and the Rose

A documentary on the life and work of the composer Sofia Gubaidulina.

1990-01-01 | en

No Ideas But in Things - the composer Alvin Lucier

“Don’t ask me what I mean, ask me what I’ve made” – inspired by this motto, the documentary accompanies the American composer Alvin Lucier (1931 - 2021) on concert travels to The Hague (Netherlands) and Zug (Switzerland). Lucier explains and comments on his œuvre – from his early live electronics performances (MUSIC FOR SOLO PERFORMER,1965 and BIRD AND PERSON DYNING, 1975) up to the premiere of his ensemble piece PANORAMA 2 in 2011. One of Lucier’s key works, I AM SITTING IN A ROOM (1969), is introduced as a central structuring device in the film. At home in Middletown, Connecticut, Lucier offers rare insights into the beginnings of his pioneering works, his time as a member of the Sonic Arts Union, his relations with John Cage and David Tudor, as well as his teaching practice at Wesleyan University.

2012-03-23 | en

Reich: Three Tales

2002-05-12 | en

I Am Sitting in a Room

I am sitting in a room is a sound art piece by American composer and sound artist Alvin Lucier composed in 1969. The first performance of the work was in 1970 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In collaboration with his partner Mary Lucier. The piece features Lucier recording himself narrating a text, and then playing the tape recording back into the room while re-recording it. The new recording is then played back and re-recorded, and this process is repeated. Due to the room's particular size and geometry, certain resonant frequencies are emphasized while others are attenuated. Eventually the words become unintelligible, replaced by the characteristic resonance of the room.

1970-10-12 | en

The Diary of a Projectionist

This is the story of my grandfather, Tiago Florit, who for 50 years was a film operator at the Teatre Principal de Maó, in Menorca. It is a review of his life, from his birth to his death, in a cinematographic key. A true love story to cinema.

2022-09-10 | ca

We Are Your Grandfather

A family of British descent settled in the Russian countryside is investigating its grandfather's mysterious death. One small step for men, women, children, dogs, and pigs - one giant leap for humanity.

| ru

After You

"My mother is spending all her time with her dying father. I’m spending all my time filming her. As the end is getting closer, my mother and I start doing the filming more and more together. It becomes our way of dealing with the time we have left." —Marius Dybwad Brandrud

2013-01-30 | sv

Line by Line - a film on the composer Ernstalbrecht Stiebler

A cello piece A punt ride Thoughts about music and composition The eight lines of Ernstalbrecht Stiebler’s cello piece Sequenz 2 alternating with his thoughts about slowness, space, reduction, repetition, resonance, liveliness and emotion A cinematic continuum

2014-11-15 | de

Letter to the Engineer

A short documentary film about the director's relationship with his deceased grandfather.

2011-01-01 | es

From There to Here

After his cancer diagnosis, an old man is given six months to live. His granddaughter’s camera gently captures his sense of belonging in China — the place he left behind but never forgot — and the story of his family in Singapore.

2019-10-10 | zh