Films are alive with the sound of music at VIFF

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      Those musical-contest shows on TV have probably confirmed a popular notion about artistic greatness: that either you got it or you don’t! And many people probably think rehearsals are just the boring bits that lead up to public displays of conspicuous brilliance.

      But rehearsals are more than opportunities for already brilliant performers to warm up their chops, as explored in a number of fascinating documentaries at this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival.

      In fact, a rehearsal is always more than a dry run for a public performance. Whether it’s a symphony orchestra or a high-school play, practise sessions carry and consolidate the history of those involved while predicting their immediate futures—all against a background provided by the culture deeply embedded in the work at hand.

      Movies like Italy’s Magicarena (screening September 28 and October 1) and the Netherlands’ Erbarme Dich: Matthäus Passion Stories (September 26 and 28) involve small armies of ordinary folks—a chorus made of homeless people in the latter—in large productions of Verdi and Bach, respectively.

      Also from the Netherlands, Imperfect Harmony (September 28 and October 3) details the struggles of avant-garde composer Louis Andriessen to impose his radically dissonant, if essentially co­herent, ideas on a conventional orchestra led by conservative conductor Mariss Jansons.

      And the marvellous Landfill Harmonic (September 26, October 2 and 4) documents an environmental project in Paraguay that an inspired teacher turned into a student movement to play instruments crafted entirely from garbage.

      The most profoundly current and emotionally provocative of the batch is The Dream of Shahrazad. The multinational production (showing October 1 and 4) follows rehearsals of Scheherazade—the highly influential 1888 work from Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov—by a very good Turkish youth orchestra under the direction of conductor Cem Mansur. This stately footage is intercut with impressionistic street scenes and handheld coverage of small groups of poets, musicians, and singers practising traditional works that comment on religious and political norms in the region. This, in turn, is supplemented by silent-film excerpts, shadow-puppet animation, and news clips depicting the Arab Spring and its authoritarian blowback. (The whole thing ties in with the epic three-part Arabian Nights series, also at VIFF.)

      “The film originally grew out of two impulses,” explains Dream’s writer-director, François Verster, on the line from his home in Cape Town, South Africa. “I wanted to work explicitly with music, and the structure it implies. And I wanted to do something with One Thousand and One Nights, a work that seems to contain so much history and meaning in the Middle East.”

      Best known here for 2002’s The Lion’s Trail, which helped restore revenue to the family of the African composer of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, Verster began this project almost a decade ago, with the intention of shooting in Iran. However, when his coproducer went to jail over some political infraction, he ended up moving the focus to Turkey, with his tiny crew taking side trips to Egypt and Lebanon.

      “We started filming in 2010, and the Arab Spring just kind of happened around us. The story, if it has one, got far more intertwined, exploring the subtle links between art and politics.”

      The Dream of Shahrazad.

      The movie also captures the sensual side of Islam, with imams and governments constantly hijacking religion in order to impose control on women and on thought. And it shows itinerant musicians working on ancient music and current folksongs that politicians definitely won’t want to hear. More than anything, it puts the lie to the notion that artistic expression is some kind of luxury, reserved for times of peace and plenty.

      Despite containing so much volatile material, Verster’s Dream has already screened twice in Egypt this year, even winning a “Freedom Prize” from the regime. “It reflects a very strange reality,” the filmmaker admits. “Perhaps the movie takes too ambiguous a line to be read that simply.”

      Well, as the film’s charismatic conductor notes: “A music score is like a constitution,” meaning the ground rules that are constantly re­evaluated and perhaps even broken.

      But first you have to practise by obeying them—before discovering what can be bent.

      Check out this year's film schedule and visit our guide for complete VIFF coverage.

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