Sometimes the most extraordinary stories come from the people who blend into the background the residents of a hotel for the indigent or the chorus of a grand opera.
“In the Shadow of the Stars,” the Academy Award-winning documentary that will be screened Saturday at the Gilpin County Film Festival, illustrates that idea with tender grace.
The movie began with a trove of footage taken by the late husband of co-director Allie Light. A chorister with the San Francisco Opera, his longing for the limelight was cut short by cancer. When Light and her second husband, Irving Saraf, examined that footage, they found a theme at once personal and universal.
“The great thing about opera choristers is that they’re like operas: Their lives are larger than life,” Saraf said in a telephone interview from the San Francisco home he shares with Light.
“Like Sigmund, in the movie, who once committed himself to a mental hospital. Then, in an opera, he sang in a scene in Bedlam, after he, himself, had been in a version of Bedlam in his own life.”
Saraf and Light most recently collaborated on “The Empress Hotel,” a documentary about the indigent residents of a hotel in San Francisco’s notorious Tenderloin district. The Empress Hotel is part of the city’s effort to house the homeless. Saraf and Light spent two years interviewing and filming its residents.
“In a way, it was a story about another chorus,” Light said.
“They had their individual stories, and their overall story of their interactions with each other. There was a lot of drama, just like in an opera house.” Claire Martin, The Denver Post
What’s on the big screen
The Gilpin County Film Festival, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday, Central City; . Passes start at $18.
“In the Shadow of the Stars” screens at 2 p.m. at the Central City Opera House. Other films include David Hockney’s “The Colors of Music,” “Denver Union Station: Portal to Progress” and a silent-film montage.
