Beethoven | Hero is a continuing exploration of the man, his music, and his extraordinary reach across time and space. The trilogy takes us on a journey through history and around the world, telling stories of the enduring power of Beethoven’s creations—of the ways they live within us and transcend the boundaries that separate us. Join us in the Dunaway Community Room for a screening of Love & Justice: In The Footsteps of Beethoven's Rebel Opera, the second film in the trilogy.
On September 11, 1973, a military coup Chile deposed the democratically elected president Salvador Allende, installed General Augusto Pinochet, and unleashed years of vicious repression. Among those rounded up, imprisoned, and executed was Jorge Peña Hen , a composer and the conductor of a renowned children’s orchestra.
Forty-five years later, documentary filmmaker Kerry Candaele traveled to Valparaiso, Chile, to make a film about Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio. The opera is about a political prisoner, Florestan, unjustly held in a dungeon but ultimately rescued by his wife, Leonore, who has infiltrated the prison by dressing as a man.
In Valparaiso, Candaele assembles an orchestra and performers to stage portions of the opera, but he also meets an eccentric Butoh dancer named María Belén Espinosa Peña. In performance, she dresses as a man—an imprisoned musician—and plays out his final days “to rescue him from the prison of forgetting”. The man is her grandfather, Jorge Peña Hen.
Struck by the similarities between Belén’s story and the story of Fidelio, filmmaker Candaele has created a swirling, poetic, and deeply musical narrative that weaves them together, along with Beethoven’s own search for love and justice.
Bio:
Directed and produced by Kerry Candaele, whose previous films include the documentary A League of Their Own, and Walmart: The High Cost of Low Price, Following the Ninth intertwines these stories with the history of the Ninth itself to create a moving ode to hope, freedom, and the power of art.
Canace Finley
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