Recent bank holiday visits to the cinema compel me to recommend a couple of new movies. It would be rude and impolite not to.
Neither film has a Hollywood production. Instead both are international, both are strongly rooted in music (if in different formats), and both films share the ability to enhance life in different ways.
One is set in historic and beautiful Venice. The other's setting is in the picturesque and contemporary west of Ireland, like another example of the country's burgeoningly sucessful film industry.
Music resonates with everyone for various reasons. The main and deeply personal one arises from being brought up in a family business based on music - sales of records in all musical genres, record players, musical instruments. This together with being raised by a mother who played the piano daily where we lived over the shop - these influences combined to mean that I was surrounded by music morning noon and night growing up.
There was even an educational element. My first encounter with Shakespeare was his play Twelfth Night, a mainstay of our Junior Certificate course. Its opening lines spoken by Duke Orsino of Illyria, a man consumed by his passion for the melancholy countess Olivia, are among the bard's most famous, easily becoming embedded in my susceptible lyrical subconscious (1) in quotations such as
"If music be the food of love play on. Give me excess of it...."
Primavera, meaning the season of spring, is an Italian film with subtitles for English. It is based on the exhilerating music of Antonio Vivaldi. His fame back in the day (and equally in the modern era) emerges as the composer of the Four Seasons. Last year marked its compositional 300th anniversary, no less.
The Italian novelist Tiziano Scarpa produced a prizewinning book (2) imagining an affair between the composer and a beautiful violinist, one of his female pupils at Venice's Ospedale della Pieta. His novel inspired Primavera the film.
In addition to the inclusion of various compositions by Vivaldi, the movie presents a drama set in an 18th century Italian church that doubles as an orphanage for young women who perform in its orchestra. While trying to avoid spoiler alerts, it will be unsurprising to feel that the dated attitudes of the then authorities to vulnerable (and talented) women. They leave a lasting impression in the telling of a compelling story.
Trad is an Irish movie filmed in Donegal and Galway whose title refers to traditional (or folk) music and is set in the modern era. It has won the audience award at the 2026 Galway Film Fleadh.
From their home in the Donegal Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking area), again we have a gifted fiddle player as she and her brother join a troupe of wandering musicians seeking adventure and musical exploration. In ways the scene is slightly reminiscent of chaotic hippie living in the 1960's, but with a more productive outcome.
The movie's acting gravitas comes from the addition of established Irish actors including Aidan Gillen, Sarah Greene, Peter Coonan and Ann Skelly. The music takes pride of place, while presenting audiences with a highly accomplished and exhilerating celebration of Irish traditional music and dance.
Escapism at its finest. In the current era, what better activity than to observe and to hear creative geniuses making positive things happen. A wonderful advertisement for our musical and acting talent. What is there not to like.
© Michael McSorley 2026
References
1. www.Shakespeare-online.com/twelfthnight
2. Tiziano Scarpa "Stabat Mater," winner of 2009 Strega Prize, Italy's top literary award for prose fiction
