After premiering at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, Max Richter’s Sleep — a documentary about the composer’s epic eight-hour overnight concerts that encouraged its attendees to sleep during the performance — will make its U.S. streaming debut on Mubi beginning March 19th, which is also World Sleep Day.
This new trailer for the Natalie Johns-directed documentary goes behind the scenes as Richter and his creative partner Yulia Mahr prepare for their eight-hour, 560-bed outdoor performance in Los Angeles’ Grand Park in 2018.
“Music is my vehicle for traveling through the world, you know sort of getting through life, is it’s like I write music to do that. And this piece is obviously very extreme in some ways, it’s a gigantic thing,” Richter says in the trailer. “For me, that is also the exciting thing about creative work. You’ve got this space that you know but, actually, sleep is stepping out of that pool of light into the dark.”
Richter’s 504-minute Sleep was released in 2015. Prior to the Los Angeles performance, the composer also staged similar concerts in London, Sydney, Austin, New York, and Paris, but those shows were indoors.
Richter told Rolling Stone before the L.A. show in 2018: “Even the biggest buildings can only accommodate a few hundred beds. So, this is us trying to sort of connect it into … like a normal concert-size audience. One of the things that the piece is about really is the communal listening experience. Going on that journey together. When we go to sleep ordinarily, we’re doing something really private. It’s kind of an intimate, private connection with our sort of physical humanity.”
From Rolling Stone US
