Florencia Di Concilio x Terence Davies
Passing Time
Florencia Di Concilio
Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1979, Florencia Di Concilio grew up in a musical family, studied piano and won so many competitions in her native country that she received a scholarship to complete her education in the US. She graduated in Boston and wanted to explore new horizons in Europe. Having mastered the French language, she ended up in Paris, where she happened to meet her compatriot Gonzalo Arijon. He was shooting a sports documentary for Arte and asked her if she wanted to compose the music. For her, it became a meaningful experience as she started to consider the music as a character. Arijon and De Concilio worked together six times. Stranded, a documentary about the survivors of the 1972 plane crash in the Andes, is their best-known film. She says the transition from documentary to fiction gave her more dramatic freedom and she was able to make eager use of that for L'homme de chevet. For this melodrama, she wrote lyrical yet austere music. She was given a week to do so.
It became a launch pad to such films as Dark Blood by George Sluizer, the animated film Calamity: une enfance de Martha Jane Cannary by Rémi Chayé, Ava and Les Cinq Diables by Léa Mysius, and Les Années Super-8 by Annie Ernaux and her son David Ernaux-Briot. Di Concilio also composed two concertos for piano and orchestra and admires composers such as Sergei Rachmaninov, Alexander Scriabin and Johann Sebastian Bach, as well as all things jazz. She starts from a classical base when composing but keeps trying to push boundaries. Even the use of unrecognisable animal sounds does not deter her, as demonstrated in Les Cinq Diables.
Terence Davies
Few have elevated sorrow into hope and turned misery into beauty like British director Terence Davies. In his - for now - nine-title filmography, he does so in a visually penetrating and haunting way. Born on 10 November 1945 in Liverpool, Terence Davies was sixteen when he left school to be an accountant for 10 years before starting his studies at the National Film School.
© A Quiet PassionEven while studying, he worked on three short films that were eventually bundled as The Terence Davies Trilogy. They are autobiographically inspired just like his first two feature films, Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes. In those films, Davies talks about his dictatorial psychotic father and his own struggles with his sexual orientation, among other things. In the 2007 documentary Of Time and the City, he says goodbye to his Liverpool. Meanwhile, he already had two brilliant book adaptations, The Neon Bible and The House of Mirth, under his belt, which were followed by The Deep Blue Sea, based on Terence Rattigan's play, and Sunset Song. His film adaptations of A Quiet Passion and Benediction are about poets, Emily Dickinson and Siegfried Sassoon respectively. In them, he discovers traits of himself, not in the least a passion for poetry. At Film Fest Gent, A Quiet Passion was awarded the Grand Prix in 2016.
