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VIFF 2007 REPEAT ENGAGEMENT
Phil Grabsky's sumptuously mounted life and times of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart presents a group of speakers, singers and players unusually well-qualified at contextualizing Mozart and his world.
Made in an accessible, popular style, Grabsky's film expects viewers to keep up with a pretty dense flow of information—one speaker likens Mozart's brief-but-packed life to "an accelerated movie" but could be talking about this fast-paced film. And though music is generally heard only in fragments, these fragments are stitched together with unusual intelligence and felicity, helping to illuminate musical points, often from several musicians' points of view.
The somewhat more generous opera excerpts (interspersed during The Magic Flute with Mozart's begging letters to fellow Freemasons) are all from recent productions and wonderfully filmed. Narrated by the velvet-toned Juliet Stevenson and featuring lots of excerpts from Mozart's often ribald letters, along with expert comment from biographers like Stanley Sadie and Nicholas Till, conductors like Roger Norrington and directors like the ever-pithy Jonathan Miller its the musicians and singers (from Renee Fleming to hot young pianist Lang Lang) who own Mozart, and it is their passionate advocacy that gives this film a real emotional power.
In Search of Mozart has broken the Gene Siskel Film Center's box office record for the most successful single-week run.—Chicago Reader
Top-drawer...essential viewing —The Guardian
Phil Grabsky is an award-winning documentary filmmaker. Phil and his company Seventh Art Productions, which is based in Brighton, make films for cinema and television. In 2001 Phil directed 'Muhammad Ali: Through the Eyes of the World', which was a major success and has been seen in over 100 countries.'The Boy who Plays on the Buddhas of Bamiyan', which Phil filmed and directed in Afghanistan during 2002/2003, has played in cinemas and on television worldwide. To date, it has won eleven awards, including first prize at Valladolid International Film Festival, and the Gold Hugo in Chicago for best film.
Phil is currently filming a major documentary in Luanda, Angola, and making a film which uses Mario Petrucci’s 'Heavy Water: a poem for Chernobyl' to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster
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