A Thousand Thoughts
A Live Documentary with the Kronos Quartet
With Sam Green and The Kronos Quartet
A live documentary with the Kronos Quartet.
Oscar-nominated filmmakers Sam Green and Joe Bini team up with Grammy-winning Kronos Quartet for a wildly creative multimedia performance piece that blends live music and narration with archival footage and filmed interviews with such prominent artists as Philip Glass, Tanya Tagaq, Steve Reich, Wu Man and Terry Riley.
As Green tells the multi-decade and continent-spanning story of the groundbreaking string quartet, Kronos revisits its extensive body of work, performing music by George Crumb, Aleksandra Vrebalov and many others. Together on stage, Green and Kronos interact with the stirring cinematic imagery on screen to craft an important record and exploration of late 20th– and early 21st–century music. Transcending the typical live music and film event, this collaboration quickly becomes a meditation on music itself – the act of listening to it closely, the experience of feeling it deeply, and the power that it has to change the world.
| Country, Year | United States, 2018 |
|---|---|
| Director | Sam Green & Joe Bini |
| Writer | Sam Green & Joe Bini |
| Cast | Sam Green, Kronos Quartet |
| Language | English |
| Runtime | 90 MINS |
| Genre | Documentary |
| Subject | Music |
| Event Type | Live Cinema |
Special Guests
Sam Green
Sam Green is a New York-based documentary filmmaker. He received his Master’s degree in journalism from University of California, Berkeley, where he studied documentary with acclaimed filmmaker Marlon Riggs. Green’s most recent projects are the “live documentaries” The Measure of All Things (2014), The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller with Yo La Tengo (2012), and Utopia in Four Movements, which screened at HCAF2010. His performance work has screened at venues such as the Barbican, Kitchen, TBA Festival, Fusebox Festival, Brighton Festival, and many others. A Thousand Thoughts premiered in 2018 at the Sundance Film Festival and at the Wexner Center for the Arts (The Ohio State University) in Columbus.
Green’s 2004 feature length film, the Academy Award©-nominated documentary, The Weather Underground premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, was broadcast on PBS, included in the Whitney Biennial, and has screened widely around the world.
Kronos Quartet
For more than 40 years, San Francisco’s Kronos Quartet—David Harrington (violin), John Sherba (violin), Hank Dutt (viola), and Sunny Yang (cello)—has combined a spirit of fearless exploration with a commitment to continually reimagine the string quartet experience. In the process, Kronos has become one of the world’s most celebrated and influential ensembles, performing thousands of concerts, releasing more than 60 recordings, collaborating with an eclectic mix of composers and performers, and commissioning over 900 works and arrangements for string quartet. They have won over 40 awards, including a Grammy Award and the prestigious Polar Music and Avery Fisher Prizes. The nonprofit Kronos Performing Arts Association manages all aspects of Kronos’ work. In 2015, Kronos launched Fifty for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire, an education and legacy project that is commissioning—and distributing for free—the first learning library of contemporary repertoire for string quartet.