After debuting at Sundance and making its way through the festival circuit, HBO Documentary Films’ “Moonlight Sonata: Deafness in Three Movements” will get a theatrical release in September. The film will start playing in New York Sept. 13 and Los Angeles Sept. 20 through distribution company Abramorama.
“Moonlight Sonata” will also make its broadcast debut on HBO in December 2019.
Directed by Irene Taylor Brodsky (“Beware the Slenderman”), the documentary focuses on Brodsky’s son growing up as his deaf grandfather grows old. Her son was born with the ability to hear but lost it at 4 years old. He gets cochlear implants and starts playing piano, and at 11 years old, he is set on learning Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” — the piece Beethoven wrote as he lost his hearing.
“I witnessed three lives over three centuries all converging to find their own voice. My film is an ode to both sound and to silence, and what we have all gained not in spite of the deaf experience, but because of it,” Brodsky said in a statement.
The filmmaker, who has two deaf parents but is able to hear, previously covered deafness in her personal documentary “Hear and Now,” which won a Peabody and the Sundance Film Festival Audience Award in 2007.
For the record: A previous version of this story had the title of the film incorrectly.