Medium

70 min. Spanish.

Medium is a film portrait of pianist and artist Margarita Fernández. Instead of retelling the story of a life, Edgardo Cozarinsky combines scenes of Fernández playing entire piano pieces with her reflections on music and art, memories of a specific concert, archive footage of performances in the 70s and encounters with her students. Brahms is the other protagonist of the film alongside Fernández, as everything seems to revolve around him for her: when she’s at the piano, in her stories and reflections, in her attempts to articulate what it means to make music, in her thoughts on passion. Fernández has an engagingly calm, intelligent and sensitive way of engaging with the world and the filmmaker and is more than an individual artistic personality in this film: Cozarinsky places her in an in-between space, making her visible as a mediator who builds bridges between the past and the present, between different generations, between scores and music, sounds and images and her art and that of cinema. (ab)

Edgardo Cozarinsky was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1939. After living and working in Paris as a filmmaker and writer for three decades, he returned to his hometown of Buenos Aires around 2000. His novels, short stories and essays have been translated into numerous languages.

Brahms and the avant-garde performer

The musician Margarita Fernández and myself have been friends for over 40 years. We are united by a love of Brahms and a youthful spirit that is always in search of new challenges. The pianist, who started out as an avant-garde performer in her later years, has inspired me to create a cinematic kaleidoscope out of meaningful moments from her life. MEDIUM portrays Margarita Fernández as a medium between the unspoken mystery of music and a vital energy that opposes the relentless march of time. Half magician, half medium, the 90-year-old pianist has transformed her concerts into performances in recent years.  
This film about and with Margarita Fernández is a testament to the admiration that I have had for her ever since our first meeting four decades ago. I realised that there exists no good-quality record, neither in image or sound, of her piano playing or of her multifaceted personality as a performance artist.
The film is therefore based on episodes, anecdotes and images from a long-standing friendship. In particular, our conversations about Brahms and his Intermezzo op. 117 #3 – a composition we always found endowed with an inexhaustible mystery.
Over the course of this project, the portrait of the artist acquired an almost metaphysical dimension, wherein the interpreter is a medium and her music has the power to transform the lives of its listeners. Margarita and I have always shared Oscar Wilde’s belief, later often quoted by Borges, that music reveals to us an imaginary past, which is nevertheless real. (Edgardo Cozarinsky)

Production Constanza Sanz Palacios, Anibal Garisto. Production companies Constanza Sanz Palacios Films (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Lumen cine (Buenos Aires, Argentina). Written and directed by Edgardo Cozarinsky. Cinematography Constanza Sanz Palacios. Editing Iair Michel Attias. Music Johannes Brahms. Sound design Gaspar Scheuer. Sound Julia Castro. Executive producer Anibal Garisto. With Margarita Fernández, Diana Szeinblum, Carolina Basaldúa, Federico Gianera, Eduardo Stupía, Francisco Ledda, Valentin Basaldúa, Eugenio Monjeau.

Films

1971: … (Puntos suspensivos) / Dot Dot Dot (71 min.). 1977: Los aprendices de Brujos / The Sorcerer Apprentices / Die Zauberlehrlinge (91 min.). 1981: La guerre d'un seul homme / One Man's War / Der Krieg eines Einzelnen (105 min., Forum 1982). 1984: Jean Cocteau – Autoportrait d'un inconnu / Jean Cocteau – Selbstportrait eines Unbekannten (66 min., Forum 1985). 1995: Citizen Langlois (60 min., Forum 1995). 1996: Le Violon de Rothschild / Rothschild’s Violin (101 min.). 1998: Fantômes de Tanger / Ghosts of Tangiers (87 min.). 2003: Crepúsculo rojo / Red Sunset (90 min.). 2005: Ronda nocturna / Night Watch / Der Nachtschwärmer (81 min.). 2011: Nocturnos (63 min.). 2013: Carta a un padre / Letter to a Father (63 min.).