Can the darkest moments of life also lift our souls? Drawing on his own experience in a Siberian prison in the company of misfits, murderers and theives, Dostoevsky was inspired to write his novel Notes from a Dead House, telling his brother at the time: ‘Believe me, there were among them deep, strong, beautiful natures, and it often gave me great joy to find gold under a rough exterior.’ In Janáček’s hands, Dostoevsky’s inspiration and the raw material drawn from an appalling world of incarceration find an even more powerful form of expression in his last opera, From the House of the Dead. Unfettered by conventional story-telling, Janáček wrote his own libretto, freely weaving together a series of stories of everyday prison life and of the fates of individual convicts.

A stage adaptation of the famous oratorio Messiah performed by the South Bohemian Theater, directed by Tomáš Ondřej Pilař and conducted by David Švec on the stage in front of the Revolving Auditorium in Český Krumlov... Director Tomáš Ondřej Pilař likens the oratorio Messiah to a large, luxurious box of chocolates containing the best of Baroque music. However, the path to the creation of this work was neither straightforward nor obvious. Georg Friedrich Händel was born in what is now Germany, in Halle an der Saale, on February 23, 1685. He was born into a Europe that adored opera, specifically Italian opera. What did Italian Baroque opera look like? At that time, it was a series of arias whose main purpose was to showcase the vocal abilities of the individual performers. To showcase how loud, how high, how fast they could sing, how they could change emotions during a single performance.

‘We are from Bohemia and you ask if we can sing?’ An unknown couple arrives in a small Czech village from abroad and most of the locals watch them with suspicion. Only the old teacher Benda, a lover of music, opens his door to them, only to find that the strangers are closer to them than one might think.

Based on Gluck's masterpiece and performed entirely on location in and around the environs of the Baroque Theatre at the Cesky Krumlov Castle in the Czech Republic; it's an opera production designed specifically for the film with outstanding sets and production values. Countertenor Bejun Mehta sings the role of the torn main character and acts as an artistic advisor, making for an involving and impeccably performed opera.