Silver Images Film Festival
Cory Anderson’s hour-long 1992 documentary offers an engaging if cursory profile of Indian-born conductor Mehli Mehta, cutting between interviews with the maestro to footage of him guiding musicians from the podium and of colleagues, students, and family praising him. Mehta is rightly credited for having brought Western classical music to India in the 30s and 40s–and the Bombay footage from that era is a find–but the film glosses over his Zoroastrian upbringing, his long-standing ties to Israel, and the trouble he’s had finding a top-notch conducting post in the West. Two of Mehta’s children–Zubin, the conductor, and Zarin, executive director of the Ravinia Festival–are pillars of contemporary classical music, but Mehli has also mentored countless musicians in LA’s American Youth Symphony, which he started in 1964; shown rehearsing the group at age 83, he’s paternal but perfectionist, an ageless wonder who still gets high on the music. (TS) On the same program, Barbara Malcolm’s Sheltered Near the River (1997), Mark Hallar-Wade’s Flowers for Charlie (1996), and Erland Overby’s Norwegian short Down, Across (1997). (North Shore Senior Center, 1:00)
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A Calcutta Christmas
