MEDIUM

MEDIUM, UN RETRATO DE MARGARITA FERNANDEZ

By Edgardo COZARINSKY

LUMEN CINE - as PROD

Biography - Completed 2019

A film about the relationship of music and the will to live a fuller life, of old age and young promise, of the enduring power of transmission.

Festivals
& Awards

Berlinale 2020
Jeonju Int'l FF 2020
screening
DocLisboa 2020
BAFICI (Buenos Aires) 2020
official competition
sheffield Docfest 2020
    • Year of production
    • 2019
    • Genres
    • Biography, Documentary, Art - Culture
    • Countries
    • ARGENTINA
    • Languages
    • SPANISH-ARGENTINE
    • Duration
    • 70 mn
    • Director(s)
    • Edgardo COZARINSKY
    • Producer(s)
    • Anibal GARISTO (LUMEN CINE), Coty SANZ (CONSTANZA SANZ PALACIOS FILMS)
    • Synopsis
    • The spirit of the film is that of a many-sided portrait of Margarita, a 93-year-old pianist specialist in the German composer Brahms’ complete legacy. She has a special relationship to his music and his personality. A photograph of him is the only portrait of a composer overlooking her piano.
      Between the contemporary and the classic, during her last phase of her life, Margarita develops a new way of expressing music. She takes part in performances of mixed theatre and avant-garde music, appearing on stage with great energy as a development of the work she started in the 1970s to create a Instrumental Action Group to explore “the no-man’s land” between music and theatre. The film gets to assist to the rehearsals and to her performances on stage building a dialogue between glimpses of her private and public life in legendary places of Buenos Aires such as the Experimental Theatre Centre, the Colon Theatre, or the enormous building of the National Library.
      She is in touch with young students, follows their work, and shares their development. Through their friendship, they inherit the whole experience of a lifetime devoted to music.
      While Margarita is alone, listens to the sounds of city life and of nature, composing in her mind an imaginary score. Her usual place of meditation is sitting by the exposed roots of an enormous hundred-year old tree, in the old Recoleta’s neighbourhood where she lives, whose presence recurs in the film as a silent metaphor or enduring, powerful life.