The 13th Arvo Pärt Centre film evenings Pärt & Film taking place from August 25 to 27 will highlight the geographically and culturally diverse world in which Arvo Pärt’s music has been set to sound.
The film evenings will open with Little Buddha by the world-famous Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, made in 1993, which is also the first major Hollywood film to feature Arvo Pärt’s music. This bright, fairytale-like film takes place in several time spaces which are separated by 2500 years, thousands of kilometres and many cultural misunderstandings.
The main composer of the music for Little Buddha is Japanese maestro Ryuichi Sakamoto, who passed away this year, whose work can be enjoyed almost throughout the film. However, at a symbolic moment in the film, the minimalist percussion solo of Arvo Pärt’s work Sarah was 90 years old is played three times over several minutes, alternating with the sounds of Buddhist rituals.
Japanese director Kôhei Oguri’s The Buried Forest (2005), which will be screened on August 26, is also fairytale-like and dreamy. Oguri beautifully portrays the passage of time, the bridges between generations, and meditates on the boundaries between the visible and the invisible. The dreamlike ancient forest rising from the ground is a symbol that we need to see beyond what reality wants to show us and that “a better world is possible” if we make the effort to change our reality. Arvo Pärt’s Silouan’s Song is played three times in the film.
With the last film played during the film evenings, director Priit Valkna’s Headwind Hall (2007), we pay tribute to Arvo Pärt’s long-time collaborator, maestro Tõnu Kaljuste, who celebrates his 70th birthday on August 28. The film follows Tõnu Kaljuste’s work on the construction of an opera hall on Naissaar, on the farmland of former inventor Bernhard Schmidt. The idea is wild, the island has no regular boat connection and no electricity, and only two permanent residents live there. Who will go to the performances? Against all odds, and despite the opposition of the public and the financial world, the charismatic Tõnu Kaljuste wants to create a unique cultural centre where tradition meets modernity, opera meets nature. The conductor’s idea seems to be as crazy as the headwind ship created by the inventor Schmidt, but in the summer of 2006, Kaljuste’s dream becomes a reality. Of course, Arvo Pärt’s music also plays in the film.