MAX RICHTER’S SLEEP

11 SEPTEMBER

DIRECTOR Natalie Johns PARTICIPANTS Max Richter, Yulia Mahr

TBC 99 MINS

It feels strange to say that a documentary about an ambient album designed to make you sleep is among the more arresting films of this year. Yet Max Richter’s Sleep fascinates through its emulation of the album’s dreamy, wandering tones, the camera freely drifting over imagery of nature, the city, people connecting and lying in isolation. As he claims in the film, Richter intended the eight-hour-long concerts (the main subject of the film) to be an anthropological study, and director Natalie Johns emulates this by examining the audience as much as she does Richter. There’s as much empathy and personal introspection as there is technical detail, and the result is genuinely blissful. KC