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Sound on Life

Written and directed by:

Katia Forbert Petersen & Iben Haahr Andersen

Director of Photography:

Katia Forbert Petersen

Producer: Annette Mari Olsen

 

Duration: 41 minutes

 

Produced by Sfinx Film/TV

in co-production with DRTV

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Sound on Life is about the life of the composer Else Marie Pade (1924-2016) and her music.

Eighty-year-old Else Marie Pade is one of the great phenomena of Danish music history, who has had a renaissance among the techno-audience. She’s become a cult figure. EMP got her inspiration from her isolation and the world surrounding her. As a child, she was often ill and bedridden. She listened to the sounds around her, on the stairs, from the yard and from the room next to hers. This is where her audio universe began.

During the Second World War, EMP was captured by the Gestapo and put into solitary confinement. Rather than despair, she started to compose music on the bare prison walls, where she scratched the notes with the fasteners of her garters. After the war, when hearing French avant-garde concrete music, she realized that the sounds resembled those that she’d heard in childhood, and it was this music that she really wanted to compose. She became the

first Dane who committed her life to concrete – and electronic music – but she had to wait 50 years

before she was “discovered”.

Sound on Life was awarded the Danish Film Academy Award "Robert" for co-direction of Best Short Documentary of the year 2007.

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