From 22–24 August, the Arvo Pärt Centre will host its 14th annual Pärt & Film evenings, offering audiences a glimpse into the extensive featuring of Arvo Pärt’s works in cinema. This year’s selection presents three films, each showcasing a distinct audiovisual style.
The film evenings will open with Paris Memories (Revoir Paris), a sensitive and personal feature by acclaimed French filmmaker Alice Winocour. Premiered at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, Paris Memories is an empathetic and therapeutic love letter to Winocour’s hometown of Paris following the devastating terrorist attack on the Bataclan concert hall in 2015. Winocour has crafted a suspenseful narrative that explores the reconstruction of memory and recollections and is punctuated by Arvo Pärt’s Fratres, which plays for several minutes over the film’s opening and closing scenes.
On the second evening of the series, audiences will be treated to Japón, the breakthrough film by renowned Mexican director Carlos Reygadas. Premiered in 2002, Japón is now considered a classic of early 21st-century cinema. Reygadas takes viewers on an existential journey to a remote Mexican mountain village, where he masterfully blends sublime visual language with a minimalist, documentary-like atmosphere. In the final scene, which visually pays homage to the overgrown railway tracks in Tarkovsky’s Stalker, a long segment from Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten plays. Pärt’s Miserere is also featured in the film.
This year, Arvo Pärt Centre’s film evenings will conclude with the most recent of the three films featured, Glass, My Unfulfilled Life, directed by Dutch filmmaker Rogier Kappers, which premiered just last November. This engaging and unexpectedly humorous documentary offers a refreshingly self-ironic reminder that it is never too late – or the wrong time – to pursue your dreams, even if those around you may not understand them. It also reaffirms the global reach of Arvo Pärt’s music and the surprising contexts with which his compositions resonate. In the film, Kappers performs several interpretations of Pärt’s works on a self-made musical instrument crafted from drinking glasses that he proudly refers to as a “glass organ”.
The Arvo Pärt Centre has been organising evenings focused on films that feature Arvo Pärt’s music since 2011. The artistic director of the film evenings is Kaarel Kuurmaa. All screenings take place at the Arvo Pärt Centre in Laulasmaa.
The film Japón will be shown with English subtitles, while Revoir Paris and Glass, My Unfulfilled Life will have Estonian subtitles.
The Pärt & Film evenings are supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.