I Hear America Singing, 78min., USA
Directed by Daron Hagen
The conventions of documentary, musical theater, and magical realism are combined and subverted to address issues of personal, national, and artistic identity through the eyes of a composer desperate to pull off one final backer’s audition whilst hounded by a disdainful documentarian named Charon.

https://instagram.com/americasinging

Get to know the filmmaker:

1. What motivated you to make this film?

I began integrating cinematic methods into my staged operas about fifteen years ago because of film's ability to combine the hyper-reality of lyric theater with the hyper-unreality of film (or is it the other way around?) in a new way. By rigorously adhering to the principle of creating correlatives between every note of music, every visual image, every sound (diegetic or not), and word and deepening them with visual and musical counterpoint (foreground, middleground, and background activity) I shift the authorial vision from screenwriter / librettist to composer-auteur director. "I Hear America Singing" is the third installment of a trilogy called "The Bardo Trilogy" (the first part is called "Orson Rehearsed;" the second "9/10: Love Before the Fall") which explores different ways that the correlatives I referred to can be combined to tell stories – in the case of these three films, the story is about how people deal with the liminal zone between life and what comes after.

2. From the idea to the finished product, how long did it take for you to make this film?

I am usually working on three shows at once. It gets a little crazy, and they begin cross-pollenating. One will be in script/score, one will be in production, and the third will be in post. I wrote the original stage script and most of the songs for "Singing" in winter 2012, between rehearsals at the Sarasota Opera for the debut of my opera "Little Nemo in Slumberland." "Singing" was commissioned as a commercial run show by the Skylight Music Theater in Milwaukee and was to be a "revue" whose numbers would be a sort of musical survey of American popular song between the mid 1800s and mid 1970's. I'd attend a staging rehearsal of "Nemo" in the theater and then work on "Singing" in my hotel room, alternating writing with preparation for a "three-camera-style" staging of another of my operas, "A Woman in Morocco," for which I was serving as director for Kentucky Opera in Louisville in a few months. It was surreal. I ultimately directed "Singing" in 2014, and then "Morocco" in 2015.

While staging "Morocco" at the Players Theater in Louisville, the idea of making "operafilms" started really coalescing, with the overarching idea of the "Bardo Trilogy," beginning with an exploration of Orson Welles' dying moments, moving on to a story about the Twin Towers disaster, and ending with a quasi-documentary reconsideration of "Singing" coming together. I began sketching the screenplay to "Orson Rehearsed," the first part of the trilogy, during the final rehearsals for "Morocco" and staged / filmed it in 2018 at the Studebaker Theater in Chicago. During those rehearsals I began the storyboards for "9/10," which took about a year to compose, and which I simultaneously staged in 2022 in an Italian restaurant (for the film shoot) and with graduate students at the Chicago College of Performing Arts. Robert Frankenberry, the extraordinary actor, singer, and composer, had starred in the original 2014 staged production of "Singing" in Milwaukee, as well as the first two Bardo operafilms. He stepped up to star in "Singing" and serve as its musical director. I wrote the screenplay for "Singing" and wrote some new musical numbers in 2023, staged and filmed it (with the amazing Talal Jabari as cinematographer) in theater and on location in Pittsburgh in 2024, and released it in 2025. So, when the character of Robbie talks about revising a show that he wrote a decade or so earlier, he's not lying!

3. How would you describe your film in two words!?

Deceptively simple.

4. What was the biggest obstacle you faced in completing this film?

Health. My aortic valve was failing during the filming of all three operafilms (a "failing heart" serves as a sort of underlying theme, obviously), so I was dealing with having less and less energy. A few months after "Singing" hit the festival circuit, a fantastic surgeon and their team fixed my heart and now I'm back to fighting strength!

5. What were your initial reactions when watching the audience talking about your film in the feedback video?

I was happy that some of them thought Robbie was a real person. I expected that others thought it was just a musical film. I was impressed and grateful when several caught that there were multiple levels – particularly the magical-realist aspect and the meta-modernist nature of the idea of American music sort of "self-destructing" in its stylistic cacophony. Of course, America is going through some pretty serious stuff now, and the show reflects that as intensely in the 2024 operafilm as the original 2012 Milwaukee staged version.

6. When did you realize that you wanted to make films?

While composing the music for "Amelia," an opera for Seattle Opera, in around 2010. During work sessions with the librettist Gardner McFall and the stage director Stephen Wadsworth, it kept hitting me that Gardner and I were really writing a film that could survive staging, forcing Stephen to repeatedly (and patiently) wrestle us back into the live opera theater and its conventions.

7. What film have you seen the most in your life?

Easy. "Citizen Kane."

8. What other elements of the festival experience can we and other festivals implement to satisfy you and help you further your filmmaking career?

I don't know enough about the filmmaking and festival worlds to offer any insight here, I'm afraid. I admit to not having any ideas about how things are, how they ought to be, or what I need to do, or have done for my work, in order to "get ahead" in my career. I think that the idea of "career" itself has grown sort of creaky and non-applicable to my way of thinking.

9. You submitted to the festival via FilmFreeway. How has your experiences been working on the festival platform site?

I have nothing to compare it to, so I don't know! Our team has been blessed to receive some really positive, supportive, and empathetic feedback from folks who have seen the projects because of FilmFreeway.

10. What is your favorite meal?

A pasta dish served to me on a snowy winter night in Venice in 1990. I asked the waiter to surprise me at Ristoranti da Ivo and he set it down and walked away. I never learned what it was called or exactly what was in it. I've returned to Ivo's now and then over the years but have never been able to identify exactly what I was given that night.

11. What is next for you? A new film?

I am sketching out the treatment for "Hide," a story that intertwines footage of the great Barrymore silent classic from 1920 with a contemporary story, with my writing partner Barbara Grecki. I am also working on the treatment for "Virginie," an operafilm set in Florence and Venice during summer 1960 about Maria Callas, Paola Mori, Orson Welles, and Federico Fellini.