Solo: A Portrait of Angela Hewitt
2018 · 4m · Canada
Directed by Jason Buxton
Genres: biography, documentary, musical
Tones: contemplative, sensual, tender
Pianist Angela Hewitt, renowned for interpreting Bach, works through a fugue in performance, revealing a creative process that turns intricate, mathematical composition into a deeply spiritual experience.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Four minutes on a pianist playing Bach feels like the most boring premise imaginable—until you realize Buxton's actually using performance footage as a Trojan horse to crack open the relationship between mathematics and mysticism, which is genuinely weird and earned.
Buxton situates this portrait squarely in the tradition of the musical documentary as spiritual inquiry—Cecconi, Wiseman—and executes with the kind of restraint and formal precision that lets Hewitt's own interpretation do the conceptual work; the camera becomes a score.
The decision to intercut Hewitt's hands moving across the keys with extreme close-ups of her face in profile—letting us watch the moment her technical mastery transforms into something transcendent—is the entire film, and it's everything.