Meet the Virtuosic Piano-Playing Machines in This Exclusive Pianoforte Clip

One of the best documentaries to screen at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Pianoforte is an electric and affecting look at the precocious competitors at Warsaw’s International Chopin Piano Competition. Filmmaker Jakub Piatek focuses not just on the music, but the intense gravity bearing down on the young players. “Coaches critique. Parents overbear. And the players bend at the piano bench, spines slouching under this atmospheric weight,” I wrote in my review earlier this year.

But for every instance of pressure, there is release. And Pianoforte’s release is gorgeous, virtuosic Chopin. In practice rooms, on stage—even in airports. Hearing the same piece played with slight variations in style reveals more about the personalities of the players than any interview could.

Paste can reveal an exclusive clip from Pianoforte, showing off these players, their music, and how they feel about each other.

Take a look:

Aside from one weeping elderly woman at the aforementioned airport, the best part of this clip is a competitor talking about his peers:

“These people, I hear it, they don’t do a wrong note—not even if you pay them. These people are serious machines. They train their whole lives. They’re like CIA. They’re really Marines. Wake up every morning, do all the push-ups and everything, they do etudes. See? Not a wrong note.”

It’s serious, but it’s silly. Maybe because the players are all still young, still elastic and goofy enough in personality, that Pianoforte is as charming and light as it is. Under any more weight, the competition would collapse into a black hole of stress. But Piatek and his subjects persist, winningly even if they’re not all winners.

Pianoforte hits theaters on December 1 in NYC before expanding to L.A. on the 15th. A planned digital release on Amazon and Apple TV comes next year, on January 9.

Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.

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