Barbara Hannigan: Soprano, and Conductor
2026 · 4m · Canada
Directed by Kevin McIntyre
Genres: biography, documentary, musical
Tones: contemplative, tender, theatrical
Soprano Barbara Hannigan builds a fearless career from Nova Scotia to Europe's opera houses and expands into conducting, leading orchestras with the same instinct she brings to singing.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A reverential music doc about a classical soprano who also conducts—sounds like a legacy hagiography, and it probably is, which means it's precisely the kind of consensus pick Felix would skip over for something weirder.
McIntyre locates Hannigan within the grand continuum of the conductor-performer tradition, and the formal rigor of intercutting her two vocations—singing as soloist, leading as maestro—creates a meditation on authority and interpretation that sits comfortably beside the best music portraiture in the festival circuit.
The real move here is likely the sound design: how the film lets Hannigan's voice *become* the orchestra, collapsing the distance between soloist and conductor through pure acoustic architecture rather than explanatory voiceover.