New documentary 'Tuning' focuses on piano at Tel Aviv train station

• Author: HANNAH BROWN
• Published date: 30 March 2021
• Date: 30 March 2021
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

Following its premiere, it will be shown throughout the month of April at the Tel Aviv Cinematheques and other cinematheques around the country. The film had its world premiere at the Docaviv International Film Festival in 2020 and was selected for the Biarritz FIPADOC film festival. It was also selected as a candidate to the Best Documentary Prize 2020 by the Documentary Forum of Filmmakers.

Music, it turns out, is a great equalizer. Soldiers and civilians, Jews and Arabs, men and women, young people and the elderly, Ashkenazim and Mizrahim, religious and secular, immigrants and native-born Israelis all sit down to play. And an enormous number of them play with great talent and intensity, in virtually every style of music there is. Even those who are far from being professional musicians are charming and engaging.

In one particularly arresting moment, a soldier who looks to be of Ethiopian descent plays a rousing jazz improvisation as an older Ashkenazi man looks on in fascination. Few of the pianists play exactly what you would guess they were going to. As the passersby stop to play, others stop to watch and listen, while many more ask the station information clerk questions, argue with a guard or simply rush past.

"What surprised me most, at the end of the day, is that you don't know who the music is going to come from," he said.

Yagoda, who has made documentaries on a number of offbeat subjects such as hospice care, said he discovered this subject by chance when his daughter lost something on a train and he went to the Israel Railways Lost and Found at that station. He noticed the piano for the first time when a soldier sat down to play classical music. Besides the beauty of the music, another thought occurred to him. "He was in a private world in a public place," said Yagoda.

"I was interested in how people react to each other, so I didn't speak...