EXCLUSIVE: Spanish actress and director María Valverde and celebrity conductor Gustavo Dudamel are making El Canto de las Manos (Song Of The Hands). The characteristic documentary will inform the exceptional story behind a deaf choir’s distinctive manufacturing of the Beethoven opera Fidelio.
Valverde will direct the doc and DJ Kurs, Inventive Director of the acclaimed Deaf West Theatre firm, is an exec producer. It’s being produced by Valverde and Dudamel’s Quinchoncho label, alongside Forty Leisure.
Dudamel is the music and creative director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Lengthy fascinated by Beethoven’s Deafness, he staged a first-of-its-kind manufacturing of Fidelio on the Walt Disney Live performance Corridor in Los Angeles in 2022. He introduced collectively the LA Phil orchestra, opera singer-soloists, a vocal choir, signing actors from the Deaf West Theatre firm and the Venezuelan Deaf choir, Coro de Manos Blancas (White Arms Choir), for an iconic efficiency. The LA Phil simply wrapped a European Tour reprising the manufacturing, which visited Barcelona, London and Paris.
El Canto de las Manos (which has the English title Track Of The Arms) takes place after the 2022 manufacturing and earlier than the current tour. It follows members of Coro de Manos Blancas who tackle the problem of making ready for, and starring in, a manufacturing of Fidelio in Caracas of their native Venezuela.
Dudamel informed Deadline in regards to the movie and the story behind it. “This documentary displays the depth and significance of a novel challenge, the interpretation of Beethoven’s solely opera in signal language,” he mentioned. “It’s a journey of transformation, empathy, difficulties, challenges, love and encounters. The vindication of an remoted and undervalued group by means of probably the most elegant human expression, artwork.”
The documentary shall be a verité fashion movie that focuses on three members of the choir, Jennifer González, Gabriel Linarez and José Gabriel Abarca, following their each day lives as they tackle the problem of studying to carry out at a world class degree.
For Valverde, the challenge marks a transfer into directing. “This documentary is a chance to get the listening to viewers nearer to a brand new and essential approach of understanding the Deaf and Onerous of Listening to Group for whom, additionally, music has a reworking energy,” she mentioned. “It’s a assembly level between two communities by which the members of El Coro de Manos Blancas develop into leaders.”
The 90-minute movie was shot in Venezuela and LA and is anticipated to have a pageant run. “The movie is a celebration of the transformative energy of efficiency, and the magic that occurs when Deaf skills are supplied the possibility to carry out on the world stage,” DJ Kurs informed Deadline. “This documentary captures their resilience, creativity, and the profound prospects that signal language and Deaf tradition provide to the world.”
Cristina Oliva and Martí Font produce for Barcelona-based Forty. The doc is made in affiliation with The DeNovo Initiative, which is a significant financier of the challenge, in addition to The Breathe Venture.
Former AMC and Blumhouse govt Marci Wiseman is an exec producer for DeNovo. Different EPs are Paula P. Manzanedo, Ana Pinós, Daybreak Bonder, MJ Peckham and Daniel J. Chalfen.
