The title is a literal one: Mark Kidel's A Journey with Peter Sellars embarks on a day-by-day journey with the titular celebrity, one of the top-tiered film and stage directors in the modern world, and easily one of the most controversial, given his postmodern inclination to reposit classical operas in anachronistic and unlikely environs. The film in question follows Sellars's doings over a pivotal two-year period that finds him engaging in such activities and roles as rehearsals of Osvaldo Golijav's Ainadamar at the Santa Fe opera house and lectures as World Arts and Culture Professor at UCLA, even as Kidel looks back to trace Sellars' prodigious and meteoric rise to a theatrical phenomenon (and the director of the American National Theater in Washington) at the age of 26. Kidel also provides an opportunity to witness the gestation of Sellars's opera A Flowering Tree.
by Nathan Southern
synopsis
