Keswick Film Festival

Synopsis

Dancing towards Christmas...

‘American documentary-maker Frederick Wiseman is often described as cinema’s foremost chronicler of Western institutions, from welfare offices (Welfare) and schools (High School) to research laboratories (Primate) and even entire towns (Aspen). For his thirty-eighth film, and his second about a ballet company after 1995’s ‘Ballet’, Wiseman documents three months spent in the opulent halls, rehearsal rooms and performance spaces of Paris’s Palais Garnier, home of the Paris Opera Ballet. With his long-time cinematographer John Davey, a single camera assistant and a crate of Super 16 film, he works his minimalist magic to utterly immersive effect, adding another quietly transcendent movie to his unique body of work…