Sony Pictures Classics debuted the trailer for official trailer for They Shot the Piano Player, the hybrid animated docudrama film on the disappearance and presumed murder of Brazilian pianist Francisco Tenório Júnior in 1976,

Along with Caetano Veloso, and Joao Gilberto, Jeff Goldblum stars in the film as an American music journalist investigating Tenório’s case.

Release Date

Directed by Javier Mariscal, Fernando Trueba, They Shot the Piano Player world premiered at Telluride Film Festival and opens in theaters with a release date of November 24th, 2023.

Synopsis

A New York music journalist goes on a quest to uncover the truth behind the mysterious disappearance of young Brazilian piano virtuoso Tenorio Jr. A celebratory origin story of the world-renowned Latino musical movement Bossa Nova, They Shot The Piano Player captures a fleeting time bursting with creative freedom at a turning point in Latin American history in the 60s and 70s, just before the continent was engulfed by totalitarian regimes.

Reviews

In their review, Variety called the film ‘a love letter to the bossa nova movement that peaked in the 1960s,’ writing “The movie gives us a fictional New Yorker journalist, voice-acted by Jeff Goldblum, who at first is pursuing a general retrospective piece on bossa nova, then shifts his focus to finding out the truth about what happened to Tenório, who was generally assumed to have been abducted and killed by paramilitary forces during his tour stopover. There is a truth eventually revealed about the pianist’s fate, but there’s no big shock or twist to it, so the spine of the movie is the conversations the Goldblum character has with Tenório’s widow, children, mistress and bandmates about the personal void he left, the banality of sanctioned evil and the glories of great musicianship.”

Official Trailer

Watch the official trailer for They Shot the Piano Player.