By John Corrado

The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto

In his latest documentary, Canadian filmmaker Larry Weinstein offers a wide-ranging exploration of the enduring legacy of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a piece that has remained recognizable over the past two hundred years with its fourth movement Ode to Joy inspired by Friedrich Schiller’s poem.

While exploring this piece, Weinstein goes from showing the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra defiantly and hopefully performing it following Russia’s invasion, to psychologist Steven Pinker speaking to the importance of embracing the egalitarian values of the Enlightenment movement that Beethoven would have been a part of. Weinstein interviews Gabriela Lena Frank, a Deaf musician who started learning piano before getting hearing aids, relating this to Beethoven’s experience losing his hearing, as well as Polish superstar Monika Brodka.

Through this, Beethoven’s Nine shows how the composition has meant different things to different people throughout its history. Leonard Bernstein conducted it to memorialize the fall of the Berlin Wall, but the film also looks at how the piece could be co-opted, with Hitler insisting that it be played on his birthday (this ties into themes explored in Weinstein’s previous film Propaganda: The Art of Selling Lies). In more playful moments, we see how Charles Schulz brought the piece to a different audience through the Beethoven-loving Schroeder in his Peanuts comic strips.

But this is also a documentary that, by necessity, shifted dramatically during production, when the filmmaker’s sister and brother-in-law were kidnapped by Hamas during the terrorist group’s horrific attack on Israel on October 7th. This naturally leads to a film that can feel like it undergoes some jarring tonal shifts, but it also allows Weinstein to craft his most vulnerable and personal work, as the director becomes a reluctant subject in his own movie.

It can be a lot to digest in a film that splinters off in several directions, and one could argue that this would have been a very different picture if certain world events had not occurred while Weinstein was making it. But the filmmaker does a fine job of tying it all into the larger tapestry of the documentary in a way that is often moving, with the recurring theme being trying to rise above the political unrest that existed in Beethoven’s day and still exists now. As the film’s subtitle says, this is an “ode to humanity” coming together in their darkest times through this powerful piece of music.

Film Rating: ★★★ (out of 4)

Beethoven’s Nine: Ode to Humanity screens as part of the 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here.