Synopsis
Seventh Symphony (2021) is a wartime drama from director Alexander Kott that you can watch online on iFILM. Leningrad, spring 1942, and one conductor is handed a near-impossible order.
Karl Eliasberg has to assemble an orchestra and perform Shostakovich's new symphony inside the besieged city. The trouble is there's almost no one left to play it: hunger took some over the winter, the front took others. The score is flown in from Kuibyshev, rehearsals run people to the breaking point, and an NKVD officer is attached both to help and to watch.
At its core is the real concert held in a packed philharmonic hall on August 9, 1942, broadcast over the radio across the city and past the front line as proof that Leningrad was still alive. Kott skips the ceremonial newsreel version and films exhausted, ordinary people for whom the music became a way to hold on. Alexei Guskov and Elizaveta Boyarskaya lead the cast. A strong watch for anyone who wants war cinema without the gloss. Stream Seventh Symphony online on iFILM.
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