The Making of Berlin Berlin / Yves Degryse

The making of Berlin – with live horn music – offers an unfiltered view of BERLIN’s working process, but above all it shows the story of one of the “discouraged” who did not stand up when Jewish fellow musicians and friends were thrown out of the orchestra. The making of Berlin is the final part of the Holocene cycle, in which BERLIN has made various city portraits over the past twenty years.

BERLIN helps Mohr to realize an unfulfilled dream. At the end of WWII, the conductor of the Philharmonic decides to perform Siegfried's Funeral March from Wagner's Götterdämmerung one more time. The performance will be broadcast live on German state radio. Rehearsing with the entire orchestra in one location soon proves to be too dangerous due to the constant bombardments. The conductor therefore divides the orchestra into seven segments and has them rehearse in separate bunkers. The faulty (recording) technology throws a spanner in the works. It is Mohr's ultimate wish to perform the technical feat seventy-five years after the fact as initially planned. The Götterdämmerung will be played from seven bunkers simultaneously, and will be heard in its entirety on the radio. A tour de force for which BERLIN calls upon the help of Chantal Pattyn and radio station Klara, the orchestra of Opera Ballet Vlaanderen and the German actor Martin Wuttke (known from Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds).

Theatre and film maker Fien Leysen records the creative process for a behind-the-scenes documentary. Her images eventually end up in the performance. Along the way, the spectator discovers together with BERLIN that Mohr's story is full of inaccuracies and that he seems to want to restore the irreparable. How elastic is the truth in the search for a final chord?