'Django' stars Reda Kateb (center) as jazz guitar legend Django Reinhardt.
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The film focuses on the guitarist in 1943, during the Nazi occupation of Paris.
'Django' stars Reda Kateb (center) as jazz guitar legend Django Reinhardt.
Get ready, guitar fans. Django, a new film about gypsy jazz guitar legend Django Reinhardt[1], is headed your way. The film, which stars Reda Kateb[2] as Reinhardt, plus Cécile de France, Beata Palya and BimBam Merstein, opens January 5 in New York and January 19 in Los Angeles.
It was directed and written by Étienne Comar and adapted from Folles de Django by Alexis Salatko. All the music in the film is performed by the Rosenberg Trio[3].
The film focuses on the guitarist in 1943, during the Nazi occupation of Paris. At that point, Reinhardt was at the pinnacle of his art; the brilliant and carefree guitarist played to standing-room-only crowds in the city’s best venues. Meanwhile, his gypsy brethren were being persecuted throughout Europe. His life took a turn for the worse when the Nazi propaganda machine decided to send him on a German tour.
"For a long time, I wanted to paint the portrait of a musician at grips with the torments of existence," Comar says. "When I was about 40, I plunged back into music by participating in a rock band with some friends, and what an experience! I loved it. I had forgotten how easily you can isolate yourself from the outside world when you’re playing music. All of us were at rather complicated times in our lives, and we got ourselves out of those complications by having fun playing music together. The time and space of musical creation is a drug that literally grabs hold of you.
"And then I thought of a discussion I had