(Photo courtesy of Kerry Candaele)
Canadian-born filmmaker Kerry Candaele is coming to Toronto to screen his latest film Love & Justice: In The Footsteps of Beethoven’s Rebel Opera. The screening takes place September 11 at the Royal Theatre, presented in cooperation with Casa Salvador Allende.
The documentary was filmed in Valparaíso, Chile, and the screening date is no coincidence. It was on September 11 back in 1973 that General Augusto Pinochet and a renegade group of officers seized power in a stunning coup d’état.
Love & Justice… begins with Candaele’s attempts to stage Beethoven’s opera Fidelio in Chile, and develops into another story of its own.
It’s part of a planned trilogy, but despite the format, though, each stands as its own film. “It’s not necessary to see them in sequence,” Candaele says. Unified by the theme of how Beethoven’s expression retains its power to move people through the centuries, they each tell a different story.
Kerry Candaele
Born in Vancouver, Kerry’s parents came from Winnipeg. His mother Helen Callaghan St. Aubin and her sister, Marge Callaghan, played baseball in the now famous All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which operated from 1943 to 1954. From that family connection, he helped brother Kelly make the documentary A League of Their Own – a documentary that was released in 1987. It caught the eye of director Penny Marshall, who made the Hollywood fictionalized version, starring Tom Hanks, Geena Davis, and Madonna.
“That got picked up, just by accident,” he says. Candaele notes that his motivation was simply to honour the true family history. “That was the start of it.” He notes another connection to baseball in his brother Casey, who went into professional baseball in his mother’s footsteps, and went on to build a career as both utility player and coach. He’s currently on the Blue Jays payroll.
A step back to the first film in the series describes the first link between Beethoven and Chile.
Beethoven & Chile
The first film in the trilogy is Candaele’s Following the Ninth: In the Footsteps of Beethoven’s Final Symphony, which he released in 2013. Kerry’s random discovery of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony during a difficult time in his life in led him to appreciate the expressive and restorative powers of the music.
When he researched the work, he became aware of its link to global protest movements. Kerry was in his late teens when the Chile’s coup took place in 1973. It marked him emotionally. “I was a politically sentient human being at the time.” After his discovery of Beethoven in his late 20s, it led to more connections. “I discovered this connection between Chile and Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.”
Following the Ninth… the first film follows people around the world who were profoundly affected by the music.
Leonard Bernstein famously conducted a performance of the iconic Beethoven symphony in Berlin in 1989 as the Wall came crashing down. That same year, protesting students in China’s Tianamen Square played it. Each year, it’s performed publicly in Japan annually on December 9, often with thousands joining the chorus.
And, women in Chile who’d lost loved ones to Augusto Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship sang its Ode to Joy outside the prisons where they’d been tortured, imprisoned, and often killed. It was the US connection to Chile that strengthened his resolve to pursue that particular thread.
Love & Justice: In The Footsteps of Beethoven’s Rebel Opera
After making many connections in Chile, and hearing stories from both survivors of torture and imprisonment and their families, he wanted to explore the idea of Fidelio, Beethoven’s one and only opera, and which directly deals with political oppression. “I wanted to put on the opera,” he says. The connection from Chile to Fidelio was a natural one. “That seemed automatic.”
The genesis of the film begins with his desire to stage parts of the opera in Chile. That’s all I knew that I wanted to do.”
Then, he came across María Belén Espinosa Peña.
Peña is a practitioner of butoh, a Japanese performing art, and not coincidentally, the granddaughter of the late conductor Jorge Peña Hen, who was taken from her family by Pinochet’s death squads, imprisoned, tortured, and killed. Her butoh performances see her transform herself into her grandfather via makeup and costume, and reenact both his life as a conductor, one who had founded a children’s orchestra locally, and his death.
Again, luck was involved.
“I had decided to go to Chile before I met her,” he explains. He saw some footage of her performing while he was preparing to make the trip — at a stage where he was still sorting out budgets and locations. “We didn’t know where we were going to film it,” he says, “then I saw Belén performing this act.”
It spoke to him as a question of memory, of keeping his memory alive. The whole history of Pinochet’s regime is one many people would still rather avoid. “A lot of people want it to disappear,” he says. Belén’s art acts against that. “I thought that was remarkable. Through her art, I think she does heal the family in a way.”
As he points out in the film, she is, as a woman appearing as a man, recreating Fidelio, where a woman notably disguises herself as a man to save her husband.
Candaele assembled an orchestra, and an atmospheric location in an abandoned building. In the film, Belén’s story, and that of her family, intertwine with scenes of the opera in rehearsal in Chile, and narration that talks about Beethoven’s own life at the time. The effect is visually poetic. “I also wanted to make a film that is artistically good.”
Instead of a single storyline, it ties the threads together thematically. “I can’t seem to tell a story very [straightforwardly],” he laughs. “There’s a lot happening.”
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As the film was shot and in production, another link to the present became more and more apparent. As he notes in Love & Justice, part of Pinochet’s success came because the Chilean public, along with the rest of the world, was confident in their longstanding democratic traditions and election process.
It only took one day, however, for all of that to vanish. Candaele draws a parallel to the mood in much of the United States today, where many are anxious about the stability of democratic traditions.
“That was unexpected,” he says.
The film was released in September 2023, to coincide with the anniversary of the 1973 coup. Candaele has taken it to institutions and screenings from Vancouver, his home town, to Europe, and Chile.
“I’ve been touring it around the United States,” he says. “It’s been out and about.”
- Find more information about Love & Justice: In The Footsteps of Beethoven’s Rebel Opera and tickets [HERE].
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