Beethoven’s Nine: Ode to Humanity, the new feature documentary from Emmy-winning and Oscar®-nominated Canadian filmmaker Larry Weinstein will have its World Premiere at Hot Docs Canadian Documentary Film Festival on April 28.
Academy Award® winner Sarah Polley (Women Talking) has come on board the film as Executive Producer.
In early 2023, filmmaker Larry Weinstein set out to make a documentary about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It was supposed to be about how far we have come in the 200 years since it was written. But when world events pull Larry into his own film, the question becomes a deeply personal one.
Beethoven’s Nine: Ode to Humanity is much more than a music film. It looks at the state of our world and how far we have come in the two hundred years since the symphony premiered. The film features Keri-Lynn Wilson and musicians from the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra; Grammy Award-winning deaf composer Gabriela Lena Frank; the psychologist and author, Steven Pinker; Jean Schulz, who is President of the Board of Directors of the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Schulz’s widow; the philosopher and writer, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein; and the Polish pop star Brodka, among several others, as they try to better understand the legacy of Beethoven’s Ninth, the composer’s own struggles, the inspiration music can provide and how humanity continues to look for hope even in the darkest times.
Beethoven’s Nine: Ode to Humanity sold out its first two screenings at Hot Docs in just a few days after tickets went on sale, and has since added a third screening, which has also been sold out.
Following the Hot Docs premiere, on May 3, 2024, the film will screen as part of the Leonard Bernstein Exhibition at Beethoven-Haus, in Bonn, Germany. This special evening will be part of an international conference on the 200th anniversary of the Ninth Symphony. On May 5, 2024, the film will broadcast on French, German and Swiss Public Television, two days ahead of the 200th anniversary of the first performance of the Ninth in Vienna in 1824.
UNITEL has jumped on board to distribute the film around the world, excluding Canada, with sales already made to ZDF/ARTE (Germany), ARTE (France), SRG SSR (Switzerland), NRK (Norway), SVT (Sweden), YLE (Finland). TVO will broadcast in Canada.