Film Screening with Kerry Candaele (Love & Justice)

*Registration is required for this event due to limited seating.

Join us for a special screening of Love & Justice with filmmaker Kerry Candaele on Friday, June 2 at 4:00 p.m. in the Kimball Junction Branch auditorium.

Beethoven composed only one opera in his lifetime, the grand and profoundly moving Fidelio. The 1805 opera tells the story of Leonore, the wife of the unjustly imprisoned Florestan, who has been slowly dying, spiritually and physically, in a dungeon run by the tyrant Pizzaro. Desperate to save Florestan, Leonore disguises herself as a young man named Fidelio and takes a job in the prison where Florestan is held. Fidelio is an opera about courage, heroism, love, and the struggle for justice in the face of despotism.

Beethoven’s operatic masterpiece is at the heart of Kerry Candaele's new documentary, Love and Justice: In the Footsteps of Beethoven’s Rebel Opera. But as in his previous film, Following the Ninth: In the Footsteps of Beethoven’s Final Symphony, Candaele tracks the themes and influence of Beethoven’s work across time and space to tell a deeply contemporary story.

Along with the tale of Leonore and Florestan, Love & Justice tells a parallel story of a man imprisoned during the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile—and the wife and children who worked to free him. The third tale woven into Love & Justice highlights the drama of Beethoven himself, who composed the opera at the very time (1803) when he discovered that he would become permanently deaf—a catastrophic spiritual defeat that he overcomes by writing some of the greatest music of his life.

"Unique and beautiful piece! I think Beethoven would have appreciated what you did, which is to bring the eternal part of his work into the present. Bravo!"--Jan Swafford, Author of Beethoven: Anguish And Triumph

"The film is lovely, compelling, poetic, mysterious, painful, magical and human."--Ed Barguiarena

"Intimate, moving—often painfully so. A lovely film."--Marina Peters