Airdate: Mrs Carey’s Concert

ABC1 will screen the feature length documentary Mrs Carey’s Concert made by Bob Connolly (Rats in the Ranks, Black Harvest, Facing the Music) and Sophia Raymond.

This acclaimed doco opened the 2011 Adelaide Film Festival before a successful cinema run.

At a girl’s high school, music director Karen Carey prepares her young students for a concert at the Opera House. Believing in the transformative power of great music, Carey insists upon a classical repertoire, sets a dauntingly high performance standard and requires the participation of every girl in the school. Carey inspires many of her girls, but some do not share her passion and are not afraid to say so.

Her greatest challenge will be firing up the unwilling, and her antagonist is 16 year old Iris. Waging open warfare against authority, the charismatic Iris is the focal point of student resistance to Carey’s Opera House ambitions, and the only girl who gets seriously under her skin.

Emily is Carey’s star musician and a different sort of headache – a gifted but troubled teenager on the threshold of a brilliant musical career if only … Carey wants Emily to solo in a Bruch Violin concerto. But to bring out her best, she needs to keep the girl from going of the rails, and then get inside her head. And that proves no easy task, because young Emily has her own distinctive take on everything.

Mrs Carey’s Concert is about music making and coming of age, about talent and courage, compliance and rebellion. About those prepared to open their minds andhearts to what the world has to offer… and those yet to discover the potential within.

8:30pm Sunday September 18 on ABC1