Stage In Development
Genre documentary
A portrait of the last five professional reed-makers supplying the world's top orchestras — and of the young apprentices racing to learn before the knowledge disappears.
Oboe and bassoon reeds are hand-made, take 45 minutes each, last between 2 and 20 hours of playing, and require a decade of training to make well. There are fewer than a dozen people in the world whose reeds are trusted by principal players at major orchestras. Most of them are in their 60s and 70s. REEDLINE follows five of them — in Vienna, Tokyo, New York, Paris, and Montevideo — over eighteen months as they take on their final apprentices. It is a film about transmission: how you pass on something that cannot be written down, something that lives in the hands and the ear. And it is a film about impermanence, made out of the most impermanent material in classical music.
Director Hana Nakamura
Producer Friedrich Engel
Writer Hana Nakamura