Love & Justice: Beethoven's Rebel Opera

The Love & Justice: In The Footsteps of Beethoven's Rebel Opera film on May 1st is being co-sponsored by Project Music Heals Us (PMHU) https://www.pmhu.org/, a non-profit organization whose mission is to provide encouragement, education and healing through bringing high-quality live music performances and interactive programing to marginalized communities, with a focus on elderly, disabled, incarcerated, and homeless populations.

Before the screening of Love & Justice, The Dolphins String Quartet (New York) will perform movement 1 of Beethoven's String Quartet in A Minor.

There will be a 25 minute Q & A with the director and other guests following the screening.

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. Almost five decades later, a Canadian filmmaker travels to Valparaiso, Chile, to make a film about Beethoven's only opera Fidelio. The opera is about the political prisoner Florestan, who is unjustly held in a dungeon, but is eventually rescued by his wife Leonore.

Kerry Candaele's swirling, poetic, and deeply musical narrative documentary, weaves together Beethoven’s operatic masterpiece with the parallel story of the imprisoned Florestan and the murdered Chilean composer/conductor Jorge Peña Hen during Pinochet's dictatorship.

The story, set in the city of Valparaiso, follows his surviving family, Pen's Butoh dancer granddaughter who intends to resurrect him in her art, and the staging of Fidelio with young musicians and singers, and the renowned folk group Napalé. What one reviewer calls "a fascinating and beautiful work", is staged on "prison hill" in an abandoned horse barn.

Love & Justice is magical, painful, but ultimately humane and hopeful, a film for our troubled times.