An official selection of the internationally renowned Planet In Focus Environmental Film Festival, Canadian-born musician James Carson, a gifted child piano prodigy cum award-winning filmmaker, brings his stunning and immersive musical docu-experience CABIN MUSIC, documenting the creation of his debut album, THE STORY OF BIRDS to Toronto’s Paradise Theatre on October 20, 2023 at 7 p.m.
The Canadian premiere of the acclaimed big-screen cinematic experience will be followed by a post-screening Q&A plus a live musical performance.
Sitting between the avant-garde stylings of Maya Deren (Meshes of the Afternoon) and the meditative tone poems of Godfrey Reggio (Koyaanisqatsi), Cabin Music weaves a synesthetic aural-visual journey around the world, in which Carson communicates not only through the piano he plays, the clay-walled cabin he builds, and the stunning cinematography he lenses but also his hypnotic editorial prowess. Interviews – with cabin builders, collaborators, and those James meets in his travels – orient and ground the concrete narrative embedded in the film’s poetry. A technical-artistic tour de force, the picture speaks directly from the subconscious, where piano tone, environment, cinematography, sound recording, and film montage all flow from the same hands, eyes, and heart, allowing the viewer to see and breathe the world as James did on his journey, and as he continues to do in his cabin and in New York to the present day.
Says Carson, “Cabin Music is not only a film, a concert, or an album. It’s the space between all these manifestations. Each gives a different point of access to the same fundamental source. The concerts provide the most intimate connection – a one-to-one communion that cannot be transmitted across any media. The recordings are for repeat listening, however, a person chooses to experience them. The film, meanwhile, is designed to do what only film can do: to viscerally bring audiences through time and place in a compressed and expanded way into the cabin and its origins. Only cinema has the scale and capacity to cross continents and ages in the blink of an eye; only cinema can immerse audiences in the roots from which the cabin is born.”
CABIN MUSIC is produced and directed by James Carson and executive produced by Julian Cautherley (THE CRASH REEL, CLEMENCY). International sales are handled by Monoduo Films.
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