Alice Sommer - Everything is a Present (Documentary of 2009)

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"Alice Sommer Herz is thought of by tens of thousands of people in many parts of the world as woman of exceptional wisdom who is uniquely untainted by catastrophe and is as inspiring a human being as one is ever likely to encounter. She touches the hearts and stimulates the minds of all who discover her. I have seen it happen again and again in the 30 years that I have known her.

When the German television station, WDR, challenged us to make the film We Want the Light, I would not have accepted the challenge If I had not known Alice Sommer so well. I had a film maker's instinct that her wisdom and her unfailing grace when recounting her experiences, would make an impossibly difficult task just about manageable.
And so it did. That film has won a number of international prizes and I am certain that they were won by Gigi Sommer. That is not false modesty. It is not to say that our skills in putting the film together were not crucially important but the inner strength, the ingredient which elevated the film so high, came, in my view, from our 98 your old star.
When we made that film we deliberately shot a great deal more material with Gigi Sommer than we would ever have been able to use, because I felt that we should, one day, make a film about her alone.
For years the idea remained a shadow but six weeks before her 106th birthday she said, "You know, old age is like illness. I am not myself. The body is unable to resist as it used to do."
That statement provided the missing catalyst. It made it imperative for me to produce a tribute to her for her rapidly approaching anniversary, using the unseen material which we shot with her when she was 98. We finished it 10 days before the great day, which falls on 26 November 2009.
When we showed her the results of our labours she said, "Very good, Nothing unnecessary. It must have been a tremendous amount of work." She said also that she very much liked the way in which the music had been integrated with her words.
Yes, dear Gigi, it was a lot of work and every second of it was golden time.
And in a glorious cause. I have devoted the whole of my professional life to making films which keep the artistic persona of our artists alive in a way that books and records and even concerts cannot do after they have left us. It happened as a result of a very unusual constellation of circumstances: first among them, the arrival of a new generation of super-talented and very exuberant young musicians and, simultaneously, the arrival of the first silent, lightweight 16mm film cameras. That made it possible for us to make a type of film that had never been made before and the appeal of the genre is enduring.
Gigi Sommer is an artist worth remembering and we are proud and grateful for having had the opportunity to do something to keep the spirit and the grace and the gravitas and the music of Alice Sommer Herz alive in the world."

Christopher Nupen, 16 November 2009

An Allegro Film by Christopher Nupen

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