Around the World in 50 Concerts

Different elements were combined to create one of the most moving documentaries about music of any kind and people from the world. Director Heddy Honigmann selected charming musicians to directly interact with the camera, chose fragments of fine music pieces among the 50 concerts the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam performed to celebrate its 125th anniversary, and captured the resonance of social conflicts and the hopes brought by music in three cities with dramatic stories: Buenos Aires, Soweto and St. Petersburg. So while we experience beautiful music, watch wonderful images of our planet or see and listen to the musicians happily talking about their relationships with the instruments they play, we also experience Heddy Honigmann's humanistic approach to an Argentinian taxi driver, a Russian victim of both Stalin's and Hitler's regimes, and two teenagers and an artistic promoter from Soweto. In all these little portraits life is related to music experience. Echoing the works of other documentary filmmakers Honigmann has contrasted within the frame of a single work the different realities on planet Earth, the easy living of some human beings to the struggles of others. We perceive beauty in the same places where violence and death once ruled, the hope and joy of living and the sad memory of past experiences. But what foremost prevails here is music, including a private little concert to a bakery worker and a huge popular concert by the Amsterdam canals that will surely move you as the concerts given in big concert halls and theaters. A joy to watch and to hear.