Saving Mozart
It’s been eighteen years since Belgian director Gerard Corbiau’s last theatrical feature The King is Dancing (2000). Although he’s unveiled some television and documentary productions in the interim, Corbiau remains most revered for his 1994 musical biopic Farinelli, which took home the Golden Globe for Best Foreign language film (and was the second title of Corbiau’s to be selected as Belgium’s nominee for the Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars, the first being his 1987 debut The Music Teacher). In 2016, there was a flurry of activity surrounding Corbiau, who first announced an adaptation of a novel by Jacqueline Harpman, La Plage d’Ostende during a round of funding from the Wallonia-Brussels Federation. However, it seems the project migrated to the back burner in favor of Saving Mozart, set in Salzburg, 1939, wherein a man named Otto Steiner, an Austrian Jew, spends his last days in a sanatorium while riddled with tuberculosis. Taking solace only in his music, Otto begins to deliberate drastic action in response to the Nazi occupation.
Release Date/Prediction: During announcements for Saving Mozart, production was scheduled to take place in the autumn of 2017, while casting announcements appeared last June. Corbiau previously competed in Locarno with L’annee de l’eveil and Karlovy Vary in 1994 with Farinelli. Corbiau’s The King is Dancing played in Berlin’s Panorama sidebar in 2001. Should Saving Mozart be ready in time, we expect a return to the Berlin program. If not, Corbiau’s comeback might be a coup for Locarno’s lineup.
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