Her setting of the Christoph Gluck.

Shot between 2007 and 2012, Hisham Mayet’s film is an exhilarating, hallucinatory, harrowing record of music, ritual, life, and landscape along the Niger River, as it winds through Mali and the Republic of Niger.

Seven films shot in Mississippi between 1968 and 1975, about the diverse cultural traditions at the roots of the blues.
Black Delta, Parts I and II; Parchman Penitentiary; Give My Poor Heart Ease — Mississippi Delta Bluesmen; I Ain’t Lyin’ — Folktales from Mississippi; Made in Mississippi — Black Folk Art and Crafts; Two Black Churches.

‘What playing!’ raved Alex Ross in the New Yorker. ‘Notes were placed with surgical care; inner voices gleamed in crystalline patterns; elusive emotional states were painted with quick, light strokes.’
A compendium of tiny homages to composers from Scarlatti to Stravinsky, and tributes to colleagues and influences, interspersed with heart-stopping Bach transcriptions. The wit and sublimity of these games, the incisiveness of the playing, four hands on the piano, and the affection between the elderly partners, are really something to see. Off the beaten path for us, but hotly recommended.

‘Dreamy musical segments, fleeting glimpses, odd sounds, temple shrines, decay, death, afternoon rains, and mysterious celebrations… from the Irrawaddy delta to humid nights on the streets of Isan province.’

A Nat is a ghost spirit: in a Pwe ceremony the Nat is summoned by a Kadaw, often a male cross-dresser. The audience is ecstatic, entranced, as the Nat possesses their bodies, the Nat Pwe orchestra thundering on.
As new, though not sealed.

Vivid, unflinching film of two annual Haitian Vodou pilgrimages — for Ezili Danto, goddess of love, art and passion, and her old man Ogoun, god of war, iron, healing. Ecstatic, bloody, intensely musical.

‘A sensual, haunting and reflective road movie that captures the magic of music.’ Grafelfing to Athens, Udine to Carthage, Tallinn to Pernes-les-Fontaines, Copenhagen to Salta in Argentina.

Unflinching yet freewheeling and wildly poetic, Olivia Wyatt’s visually stunning film of thirteen Ethiopian tribes, complemented by a 136-page book of Polaroids and a CD of field recordings.

We love this film. Warmly recommended.