A New Score Strikes Back

Die Deutschmeister(de)

Young Stanzi who is visiting Vienna helps a young corporal and musician to become famous for his marching song "Die Deutschmeister".

August Rush(en)

Lyla and Louis, a singer and a musician, fall in love, but are soon compelled to separate. Lyla is forced to give up her newborn but unknown to her, he grows up to become a musical genius.

Samuel Barber: Absolute Beauty(en)

Known for his mournful "Adagio for Strings," Samuel Barber was never quite fashionable. This acclaimed film is a probing exploration of his music and melancholia. Performance, oral history, musicology, and biography combine to explore the life and music of one of America’s greatest composers. Features Thomas Hampson, Leonard Slatkin, Marin Alsop and many more of the world's leading experts on Barber's music, with tributes from composers Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson and William Schuman. The film was broadcast on PBS, and screened at nine film festivals internationally, with three best-of awards. It was named a Recording of the Year 2017 by MusicWeb International.

An American Dissident: un tributo a Frank Zappa(it)

An American Dissident: un tributo a Frank Zappa is an Italian documentary that aired on the Videomusic channel on January 7, 1994. It includes footage from Zappa's Universe, Video From Hell, Does Humor Belong In Music?, Baby Snakes, The True Story Of 200 Motels, The Late Show, Zappa's May 17, 1988 show at Palacio de Deportes in Barcelona, Spain, The Dub Room Special, various other interviews and performances.

Donde mueren las palabras(es)

An old timbal performer in a puppet theater has a secret past.

Frank Zappa: Peefeeyatko(en)

For the past ten years Zappa in composing has turned away from Rock and Roll music - for which he first became famous - and has been working on new, contemporary, orchestral electronic music; in solitude and beyond any commercial conventions or commitments. It is the first time that Zappa has allowed a film crew to study him during compositional work, actually filming the first moments of a new compositional process. By contrast, in a staged interview Zappa gives comments on music. This film seeks to reveal the sensetivities of Zappa's personality and character also beyond narrative content.

Song of My Heart(en)

The portrait of Russian composer Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky focuses on his failed love affair.

Children of Pleasure(en)

A successful songwriter, dazzled by high society, falls for a society girl who is just playing around.

Immortal Beloved(en)

A chronicle of the life of infamous classical composer Ludwig van Beethoven and his painful struggle with hearing loss. Following Beethoven's death in 1827, his assistant, Schindler, searches for an elusive woman referred to in the composer's love letters as "immortal beloved." As Schindler solves the mystery, a series of flashbacks reveal Beethoven's transformation from passionate young man to troubled musical genius.

The Broken Melody(en)

A composer goes to Devil's Island for killing his wife's lover, then writes an opera about it.

The Life and Loves of Beethoven(fr)

Lyrical biography of the classical composer, depicted as a romantic hero, an accursed artist.

Wandering Stars(fr)

This film follows the making of Nekfeu's 3rd album, between Paris, Japan, Greece and the United States.

Charles Ives: A Good Dissonance Like a Man(en)

A thoroughly researched biopic of Charles Ives, America's greatest and most innovative composer (and insurance executive), who combined strikingly futuristic experimentalism with gentle nostalgia. Includes narration taken directly from Ives's own writings, and reminiscence from those who knew him.

The Music of Kander & Ebb: Razzle Dazzle(en)

A profile of composing team John Kander and Fred Ebb, who have written many Broadway musicals. Highlights include interviews with Lauren Bacall, Joel Grey and others, as well as the two men themselves, plus clips of performances of their songs.

You're the Top: The Cole Porter Story(en)

Biographical portrait of one of Broadway's most brilliant songwriters. Told through the use of archival material and interviews with the rich and famous that knew him, this portrait concentrates on his career and his public life events.

Amadeus(en)

Disciplined Italian composer Antonio Salieri becomes consumed by jealousy and resentment towards the hedonistic and remarkably talented young Viennese composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Conversando com Compositores: O Mercado da Música no Rio Grande do Sul(pt)

Frank Zappa: A Pioneer of the Future of Music(en)

Frank Scheffer's (collage like) documentary on the American composer and rock guitarist Frank Zappa, as broadcast by VPRO in the Netherlands April 22,2007. Most of what’s on here is seen before, particularly in Roelof Kier’s 1971 documentary and/or Scheffer’s own documentary “A present day composer refuses to die”. But there is some new stuff too, particularly interviews with Denny Walley, Haskell Wekler, Elliot Ingber and Bruce Fowler.

Blueprint(de)

The story of the first cloned human being - told in her own words: At the age of thirty the world-famous composer Iris Sellin learns that she has an incurable illness. She - a person who wanted to live for ever - does however not give in. In order to preserve her art and also herself, beyond death, for all posterity, she has herself cloned. Her daughter Siri, whom, in this way, she turns into her virtual twin, learns as a child that she is the world's first cloned human being. In fact a blueprint: a blueprint of her mother. From that moment on nothing is as it was before...

House of Ricordi(it)

The film covers a hundred years in the lives of the Ricordi family, the Milan publishing house of the title, and the various composers and other historic personalities, whose careers intersected with the growth of the Ricordi house. It beautifully draws the parallel between the great music of the composers, the historic and social upheavals of their times, as well as the "smaller stories" of the successive generations of Ricordi.