Love & Justice: In The Footsteps of Beethoven's Rebel Opera

Love & Justice is a film about how a young woman saves her murdered conductor grandfather from being erased from memory by a military dictatorship Chile. Maria Belen Espenosa Pena uses her Butoh theater to resurrect a man and a past worth saving. Her performance mirrors the plot of Beethoven's only opera, Fidelio. This poetic, intimate, mysterious and shocking film is a tale for our perilous times, a tale of love and justice.

Q&A with the director following the film.

On September 11, 1973, a military coup Chile deposed the democratically elected president Salvador Allende, installed General Augusto Pinochet, and unleashed years of vicious repression. Among those rounded up, imprisoned, and executed was Jorge Peña Hen, a composer and the conductor of a renowned children’s orchestra.

Forty-five years later, documentary filmmaker Kerry Candaele traveled to Valparaiso, Chile, to make a film about Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio. The opera is about a political prisoner, Florestan, unjustly held in a dungeon but ultimately rescued by his wife, Leonore, who has infiltrated the Prison by dressing as a man.

In Valparaiso, Candaele assembles an orchestra and performers to stage portions of the opera, but he also meets an eccentric Butoh dancer named María Belén Espinosa Peña. In performance, she dresses as a man—an imprisoned musician—and plays out his final days “to rescue him from the Prison of forgetting”. The man is her grandfather, Jorge Peña Hen.

Struck by the similarities between Belén’s story and the story of Fidelio, filmmaker Candaele has created a swirling, poetic, and deeply musical narrative that weaves them together, along with Beethoven’s own search for love and justice.

The film is being released on the 50th anniversary of the Chilean coup, and is dedicated to its victims.