The Song of Life

Music has a very special power. There is certainly no doubt about that. Music can move us to tears, it can bring us joy, give us strength in difficult times and it can bring people together. The composer Bernhard König wants to help people of the 70plus generation to find new happiness and momentum in their lives with the help of music. For this purpose, he sat down with some senior citizens in Stuttgart's Sonnenberg Generation Centre and conducted long biographical interviews with them. On the basis of these interviews, the composer tried to translate old traumas and deep-seated desires into music in order to find a very personal song of their lives for each of them. A project that filmmaker Irene Langemann accompanied with her camera.

The result is The Song of Life, a sometimes very moving documentary that presents Bernhard König's project Old Voices in a very engaging way. The camera not only follows him to his conversations and rehearsals in Stuttgart, but also looks over his shoulders as he works with the Cologne experimental choir Alte Stimmen. The fact that he sometimes elicits very painful memories of the past from his interlocutors and also keeps on probing, even when there is a call for something nice and cheerful, may at first seem a little disconcerting and also unpleasant. But then, when you see how the seniors blossom when they get to perform their song of life with König, it becomes clear why the composer chose this not always easy confrontation with the past and that it really pays off.

Whether it is the passionate accordion player Willi Günther, who has been unable to play his favourite instrument since suffering a stroke, the blind psychologist Sigrid Thost, who rediscovers a joy in life she thought lost when improvising together with König at the piano, or the 91-year-old Alfred Adamszak, who deals with the horror of the Second World War with a very special choral improvisation, they all stepped out of the shadows with the help of music and enchanted not only the audience on site, but also the cinema audience with their openness and their naturalness.

It has a very positive effect that Irene Langemann completely renounces an explanatory narrative and reduces her role completely to that of an observer. In this way she also allows the viewer a quite unfiltered and unadulterated insight into König's work. This is at times very moving, at times refreshingly amusing, at other times sad or simply beautiful. The Song of Life is not only an interesting, but also a very entertaining documentary, which is worth watching not only, but especially for viewers over 50 and somehow also makes you want to go in search of your very own song of life yourself. Worth seeing

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp