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Hong Kong

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8:00 PM

Cicada x ‘Berlin: Symphony of a Great City’

Film & Music|The 3rd Macao International Documentary Film Festival

  • Dom Pedro V Theatre, Macau

3rd Macao International Documentary Film Festival ©Macao International Documentary Film Festival

Goethe-Institut Hongkong is pleased to support The 3rd Macao International Documentary Film Festival for the first time, by presenting the classic and spendid film Berlin: A Symphony of a Great City, directed by Walter Ruttmann, as the closing event of the festival together with the live music by Taiwanese band Cicada.

Thanks to the advance and spread of film restoration technology, a great amount of masterpieces in film history are able to be reborn after meticulous restoration and can be presented to the audience with a fresh and new look. From this year, MOIDF will set up Classic Selections to introduce legendary documentaries to the audience. With the theme of the year "Imagine/the World", we selected, among all the documentaries about City, the liveliest and the most representative work, Berlin: Symphony of a Great City.
 
In order to travel the audience from Berlin in 1920s to its present in the 22nd century, we invited Taiwanese band Cicada to join the screening. Cicada has been using their music to depict the relationship between human beings and environment. And this time, they will perform specially-arranged music to bring us back to the past to consider the present and imagine the future of the city.
 
It is Cicada’s first time in Macau and the concert will be performed only once!
 

Berlin: Symphony of a Great City

1927, Walther Ruttmann, 64min, Germany, B&W, without dialogue, Blu-ray
Director Walther Ruttmann seemed to see a symphony in the hustle and bustle of the street. He then came up with the idea of making this film classic about the city of Berlin.
 
With Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, the audience can experience an entire daily cycle in Berlin: from empty streets in the early morning and the slow arrival of trains, to the busy machines and people going to work, to the lively post-work evening entertainment. All these scenes create a rhyming combination, with the constant flow of urban objects appearing like musical notes to compose a symphony called City.
 
This film expresses a passion for modern city life: trains, trams and industrial machines share an equal role with city dwellers, becoming the main characters of the movie.
 

Cicada

Cicada was formed in 2009 consists of violin, cello, acoustic guitar, and piano. It's named after Cicada because people are aware of cicada's existence by their sound instead of forms.
 
Since 2013, Cicada has been releasing works based on the landscape of Taiwan. In 2017, ‘White Forest’ was dedicated to animals including coral reefs, humpback whales, dolphins. Cicada portrayed the relationship between human and ocean and its impacts to animals with their music.

https://cicada-tw.com/
https://cicada.bandcamp.com/