September Songs: The Music of Kurt Weill

September Songs: The Music of Kurt Weill is a fusion of film, theatre, and concert performance that reimagines the music of the German composer Kurt Weill whose songs bridged opera, cabaret, and popular music with piercing social and emotional insight.

Featuring an extraordinary ensemble — Teresa Stratas, Lou Reed, Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, Charlie Haden, Elvis Costello & The Brodsky Quartet, Betty Carter, Mary Margaret O’Hara, William S. Burroughs, and more, with legendary producer Hal Wilner as music supervisor — September Songs transforms Weill’s work into a haunting collage of performance, theatre, and cinema. Each artist reinvents Weill’s legacy through their own lens, creating a living dialogue between past and present, exile and belonging, beauty and decay. Blended throughout the film are stylized “documentaries”, evocative imagery, and cinematic transitions that transform Weill’s haunting melodies and biting social commentary into a contemporary meditation on art, exile, and the human condition. The film celebrates Weill’s enduring influence on 20th-century music and culture.

Through its visuals, its music and its original choreography, the film merges concert, cabaret, and expressionist cinema into a single dreamlike experience. The restoration — undertaken by Sphinx Productions with the generous support of Telefilm Canada — faithfully revives the film’s original textures, sound design, and the distinctive cinematography of celebrated German DOP Horst Zeidler, preserving a landmark of Canadian music cinema for new audiences worldwide.

Q&A with director Larry Weinstein