Still: Half Moon - Frank Scheffer

Half Moon** (premiering in IFFR’s Harbour section) is the third part of an envisaged tetralogy from Dutch director Frank Scheffer. The first was Gozaran – Time Passing (2011). It was followed by Inner Landscape* which premiered at IFFR in 2019. The fourth film, yet to be made, will be called Timeless Breath* and will be shot in India. 

Like all of Scheffer’s work, Half Moon is centred around music. Its subject is the virtuoso Syrian clarinettist and composer, Kinan Azmeh, who has lived in New York since 2001, unable to return to his home town of Damacus since the uprising of 2011.

Scheffer first met Azmeh in Damascus in December, 2009, which he was visiting together with Michael Dreyer, director of Morgenland Festival Osnabrück, a music event in Germany.

“We were actually researching Ibrahim Keivo, the Syrian troubadour, because I thought it would be interesting to make a film about him. We were in a restaurant and suddenly Kinan came in.”

The filmmaker and the clarinettist struck up a conversation and had an instant rapport. “Immediately, I was very fond of Kinan and I thought he would make a great protagonist,” Scheffer stresses. That evening Dreyer also decided to commission Kinan to write his first orchestral piece.

Azmeh is now based in Brooklyn but, as the documentary makes clear, he travels very widely and spends a fair amount of time in Amsterdam. He is also involved in many intriguing collaborations. At one stage, we see him performing a duet with his close friend, the legendary cello player Yo-Yo Ma, from the exterior of a building in Beirut. He works often with his fellow Syrian, mezzosoprano and composer Dima Orsho. He plays jazz as well as classical music. His compositions are performed by many renowned orchestras. 

“The film is about Kinan and his musical friends,” the director explains, adding that, “I regard all my films as non-political, but I agree with Johan van der Keuken [Dutch master documentary maker] when he says that every work of art is politically engaged.”

Scheffer spent many years making documentaries about western musicians. His previous subjects included everybody from John Cage to Frank Zappa. However, after encountering Iranian composer Nader Mashayekhi (the subject of Gozaran), he realised that if he wanted to “have a more complete oversight of music, then I should include the rest of the world and not only limit myself to Europe and the United States.”

That’s where Azmeh comes in. “Kinan, for me, is a composer of the global village,” the director reflects on the Syrian maestro. “He is drawing from all kind of different sources. In the film, I really want to put him as a contemporary composer equal to all the great European composers. We live in a time in which the influences are worldwide…and he reflects that. Music can be seen in different ways. As entertainment, that’s fine, that's great. But if you want to shape and touch the spirit of people, that’s something else. There comes music as an art - and that is what my films are digging into. I felt that Kinan was now in the pantheon of great composers.”

At the end of the credits, Scheffer uses a quote from Bertolt Brecht: “In the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.” 

Azmeh has certainly lived through some very dark times since he left war-torn Syria as the Middle East continues to go through convulsions. The poem ‘Half Moon’ itself, which gives the documentary its title, refers to children being buried. Scheffer concedes that this is “probably my most political film, since the context is so terrible.”

There are moments of hope, though. Azmeh is shown planting a tree in Brooklyn with his doe-eyed son, symbolically putting down roots.

“In the script I wrote, I always wanted to go to Damascus to plant a tree since planting a tree in Syrian culture is very significant, making contact with the soil where you come from.”

But Azmeh couldn’t go back to Syria, and was determined to have no contact with the Assad regime there (which has since been toppled). Another factor was that Azmeh’s father had recently died. “Somehow, going to Damascus without his family being there was not the right thing to do, I felt,” Scheffer suggests. That’s why the scene was shot in New York instead, the city where Azmeh’s own son was born.

Over his many years of making films about musicians, Scheffer has become expert at filming performance. “Live music is being presented by different human beings. I was inspired by composer Elliott Carter who sees his musical instruments as characters,” the director explains his technique. “In the way I construct my camera people, I make choices. I like to treat the players as actors and look for visual transformations.”

Despite his international reputation, it is always a struggle for Scheffer to pull projects together. Half Moon has taken him many years to complete. He started work on it in earnest back in 2017.

“These are big films. They take a long time to develop because I have also to grow into another culture and make that culture part of me so I can be sensitive to [its] nuances… I hate the idea of being colonial. We can learn from these other cultures. I like to be universal as a director!”

Half Moon was produced by Niek Koppen and Jan De Ruiter at Selfmade Films and by Jia Zhao at Muyi Film. Mokum is handling the Dutch distribution. The release is set for early March.

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*Film is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund
**Film is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund and the Production Incentive