Photo by Dusan Martincek
Park City Film will give cinema lovers a chance to travel the world without leaving their home theaters this month.
The nonprofit’s board of directors decided last month to keep the Jim Santy Auditorium closed until at least February, so it will continue its virtual cinema screenings that will include films from Germany, Argentina, Japan and Brazil, according to Executive Director Katharine Wang.
“We will take things as they go,” Wang said. “We’ll be keeping our eye on what the COVID case counts look like and the health of the community. We want to be respectful and responsible.”
“Louis van Beethoven” – A symphony [MOVIE REVIEW]
SHARE Sabin Tambrea as Pfeiffer and Colin Pütz as young Beethoven in Louis von Beethoven. Photo courtesy of Eikon Media and Film Movement.
Sabin Tambrea as Pfeiffer, an early teacher, and Colin Pütz as young Beethoven in “Louis von Beethoven.” Photo courtesy of Eikon Media and Film Movement.
“Louis van Beethoven,” written and directed by Niki Stein, is film biography of the composer better known as Ludwig. Made for German television, “Louis van Beethoven” has all the production values of a fine film. And a fine film it is, indeed.
Stein has chosen to frame the history of one of the greatest composers ever to live (if not the greatest, depending on where you rank Bach and Mozart) by juxtaposing the last months of his life against his early story. If this sounds like the interminable use of flashbacks, it is not; it’s much more complex and interesting. Although much is commonly known about the man
The 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth finds an agreeable tribute in the German television film “Louis van Beethoven,” available now on VOD. That first name isn’t a typo: It’s the everyday moniker for Ludwig we hear throughout writer-director Niki Stein’s biopic of the legendary composer, which juxtaposes his latter days as an irascible, lonely, deaf artist plagued by debts and family infighting with his early growth as a prodigy.
We first encounter the middle-aged Beethoven (Tobias Moretti) in a mood on the way to his younger brother’s countryside home an emotionally fragile nephew (Peter Lewys Preston) in tow, a sonata for money still unfinished. A letter from an old flame sparks the threaded-in flashbacks to boyhood days of promise and bitter lessons in late 18th