Background to the film idea

For 25 years, the Scuola Vivante has been committed to promoting diversity in life, a fair world, dialogue between different people and cultures, and caring for the earth and ourselves. This endeavour has borne fruit in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco, initiated after an educational trip with students in 2007: the partner school école vivante, which will start its seventh year in the summer of 2016.

Several times already, students and teachers from Scuola Vivante have travelled to Morocco to the remote Ait Bouguemez, the ‘Valley of Happiness’, to visit the école vivante, which currently runs a primary school with around 40 children. Plans are underway to expand the school with a secondary school and a public workshop where, in addition to crafts and art, inventive skills will be promoted and vocational training offered. The children and young people of Scuola Vivante have been actively involved in fundraising and educational development at the école vivante. A lot of work, heart and soul have gone into this partnership.

This commitment to peace and to building this innovative educational project in the High Atlas Mountains has earned Scuola Vivante a place in the network of UNESCO Associated Schools.

In this context, Scuola Vivante was fortunate to engage Jordi Savall, one of the most important contemporary musicians and researchers of early music and a UNESCO cultural ambassador, for a joint concert entitled ‘Orient – Occident’. This took place in April 2012 in the Herz Jesu Church in Buchs SG, organised by the school. The team and pupils prepared for this concert, put together a comprehensive reading programme booklet with historical, geographical, linguistic, artistic and biological topics, worked on voice training and sang along in the final part of the concert.

The central element of Jordi Savall’s musical work is the search for common ground: the shared musical language of different cultures, peoples and religions. The connection between music and history. In this search, he not only brings forgotten songs back to life, but also nourishes the ancient human longing to meet in peace and live in peace.

This shared endeavour by Jordi Savall and the Scuola Vivante led to another concert in April 2014, entitled ‘Mare Nostrum – Dialogue of Ottoman, Jewish and Christian Music from around the Mediterranean’. Jordi Savall was joined on stage at the Herz Jesu Church in Buchs SG by 18 outstanding instrumentalists and vocalists from Armenia, Turkey, Greece, Israel, Italy, France, Catalonia, Spain and England – a musical journey around the Mediterranean with stories of migration and dialogue between the three great monotheistic religions. Jordi Savall once again integrated the choir of the Scuola Vivante into the final part of the concert, in a Turkish, Arabic, Greek and Hebrew variation of the folk song Ghazali – a song that has spread throughout the Middle East and has been sung or danced in various countries, each in a slightly modified form, in their own national language, but still unmistakably the same piece. Once again, the pupils and teachers prepared extensively for this concert – this time with a greater focus on the musicians, their instruments, their home countries and their languages.

With the inclusion of the children’s and youth choir of the Scuola Vivante, Jordi Savall drew a line from early music – with its central concern of preserving history – to the current politically, socially and religiously tense situations between North and South and East and West: towards the future generation that will carry us forward. This generation is given a voice in the concert and is called upon to participate in these dialogues, to continue them and to work for a just world.

The organisation of this event was once again in the hands of the school: the school management – in particular Jürg Mäder – the team, the parents, children and young people. The Mare Nostrum concert was recorded by three cameras and a fourth camera operated by a student under the direction of Stefan Haupt and Geroges Gachot.

On a fortnight-long educational trip in May 2014, one month after the Mare Nostrum concert, a group of secondary school pupils from Scuola Vivante travelled overland along part of this route and across the Mare Nostrum to their partner school in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco. This journey of around 4,500 kilometres led from Switzerland through France and Spain, across the Strait of Gibraltar to Tangier, to the blue city of Chefchaouen, to Fez and Marrakesh, and finally to Ait Bouguemez, home of the École Vivante and the destination of the trip. Ait Bouguemez is a remote valley in the middle of the High Atlas Mountains at an altitude of 1,800 metres, far away from the nearest large towns. The inhabitants of the valley are Berbers, most of whom earn their living from small-scale farming and livestock breeding. Life is shaped by the rhythm of the seasons and the harsh natural environment. In many areas, the way of life is still very traditional, and most work is still done in a homogeneous manner and as a community.

The young people and their chaperones set off, leaving behind the familiar and entering the unknown, allowing themselves to be touched by a part of the world that found musical expression in the concert. They came into contact with people and their work, engaged in conversation, formed relationships and sought common ground – their shared roots.

It was an incredibly rich and profound journey full of impressions and experiences, captured in over 100 hours of film footage – filmed by the young people themselves under the direction of Veronika Müller Mäder, after a professional introduction and training in camera handling, sound engineering and directing. It is worth mentioning that the camera equipment was purchased with part of the prize money from the 2013 Swiss School Award. The travel group itself was responsible for financing the trip, including budget planning and a financing plan.

The film

The film connects the three different stories – the concert, the interviews with the musicians and the trip to the école vivante.

The music and concert recordings run like a thread through the film. They alternate with fascinating, humorous and profound interviews with Jordi Savall and nine musicians from Hespèrion XXI from Armenia, France, Greece, England, Israel, Spain and Turkey.

These conversations were conducted and recorded on the sidelines of the concert in the premises of the Scuola Vivante together with pupils, parents and teachers – under the direction of Stefan Haupt and Georges Gachot. The musicians talk about their lives and their homeland, their love of music and their instruments, and discuss the significance of being able to make music in such a large, culturally and religiously diverse ensemble.

Michelle Brun and Stefan Haupt artfully integrate the story of the Scuola Vivante’s educational trip to its partner school, the école vivante in Morocco, into the concert programme and the conversations with the musicians.

The children and young people can participate in every step of the post-production process (editing, sound engineering, grading, graphics) and learn along the way. The secondary school students transcribed all the German, English and French interviews with the musicians. The voice-over texts are a compilation of excerpts from the travel diaries of the Morocco travel group. The voice-over will be selected in an internal school casting and recorded in a recording studio in Zurich.

CH-Buchs SG, May 2016

Link to the school initiative Scuola Vivante