Music
61st New York Film Festival
September 29 - October 15, 2023
Leading contemporary German filmmaker Angela Schanelec’s latest film pushes her oblique narrative approach to new levels of emotionality. Using abstract gestures and broad narrative ellipses, yet still managing to plumb the depths of its characters’ complicated traumas, Music tells the story of a young man and woman unknowingly united by the same violent death.
Leading contemporary German filmmaker Angela Schanelec (I Was at Home, But…, NYFF57) is singularly adept at creating dramas of unexpected catharsis via the most oblique narrative strategies. Her latest film, Music, pushes this approach to new levels of emotionality. Using abstract gestures and broad narrative ellipses, yet still managing to plumb the depths of its characters’ complicated traumas, Music tells the story of a young man and woman unknowingly united by the same violent death. Brought together by fate and horrible irony, Ion (Aliocha Schneider) and Iro (Agathe Bonitzer) first meet in prison, where he’s an inmate and she’s a guard; they kindle a romance fomented by passion for classical music and opera, followed by marriage and children. Yet as in all tragedies, the past returns to haunt them. Inspired by the Oedipus myth, Schanelec has created an alternately austere and vivid portrait of grief and redemption through art told with her distinctive compositional rigor. An NYFF61 Main Slate selection. A Cinema Guild release.
Recommended Film Comment reading:
- The Film Comment Podcast: Music (Berlinale 2023)
- Interview: Angela Schanelec on The Dreamed Path (2017)
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Angela Schanelec continues to move to her own inimitable beat.
—Justin Chang, The New Yorker
From the darkness of a timeless tragedy emerges light.
—Beatrice Loayza, New York Times
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