The Berlin Film Festival begins on Thursday, February 16th and lasts until February 26th, and this year’s main competition program also includes a minority Serbian co-production – the feature film Music by German director Angela Shanelec. Film Center Serbia supported the production of the film.Theauthor’s previous film, I was at home, but… (2019, also produced with the support of FCS) had its world premiere in the competition program of the Berlinale, where Shanelec was crowned with the Silver Bear award for best director, after which was a long series of awards at film festivals around the world ensued.
An abandoned at birth in the Greek mountains on a stormy night, John was taken and adopted without ever knowing his father or mother. As a young man, he meets Iro, the warden of the prison where he is imprisoned after a fatal tragic accident. She seems to be seeking his presence, taking care of him, recording music for him. John begins to lose his sight… From then on, for every loss he suffers, he will get something in return. So, despite being blind, he will live his life more fully than ever.
Shanelec wrote the screenplay, edited and directed the film. The director of photography, as in her previous film, was Ivan Marković, Rainer Gerlach was in charge of the sound, Anert Gitter was in charge of the costumes, and Ingo Klier was in charge of the scenography. Cast: Aliocha Schneider, Agathe Bonitzer, Marisha Triantafyllidou, Argyris Xafs, Frida Tarana, Ninel Skrzypczyk, Miriam Jakob, Wolfgang Michael, Finn-Henry Reyels. The producers of the film are: Kirill Krasovski (Faktura Film), François d’Artemare (Les Films de l’Après-Midi), and the co-producers are Vladimir Vidić and Nataša Damnjanović (Dart Film). Giorgos Karnavasi and Konstantinos Kontovrakis (Heretic) are the executive producers of this production, a co-production between Germany, France and Serbia.
Angela Shanelec was born in 1962 in Allen, Germany. After graduating from high school in Frankfurt, from 1984 to 1990, she worked as an actress in numerous German theaters. She attended the Academy for Film and Television in Berlin (DffB) in 1990, where she met Christian Peckold and Tomas Arslan, with whom she formed what would later become known as the “Berlin Film School”, i.e., her first wave. Since then, she has written and directed several short and feature films, which were premiered at festivals in Cannes (2004 “Marseille” – A certain view, the award for the best screenplay of the German Film Critics Association), Berlin (almost all her films, except ” Marseille” and “Dreamy Road”), Toronto and Locarno (2016 “Dreamy Road”). Retrospectives of her films were organized in Rome, Lisbon, Buenos Aires and Mexico City.