With her music as its central focus and interviews with Björk and David Byrne, 'Monk in Pieces' is a mosaic that illuminates the highly original sound and imaginary vocabulary of Meredith Monk.
“I had an MRI and I was happy,” says Meredith Monk with serenity and a sense of humor, revealing her inexhaustible curiosity about sound, the body, and the inner vibration of things. 'Monk in Pieces' is a fragmented portrait of the multifaceted composer, singer, and choreographer, a mosaic that includes interviews with Björk, David Byrne, and Philip Glass, archival footage of her performances from the 1970s, and dreamlike animations that evoke the inner world of an artist who conceives of each performance as a political and collective gesture.
By eschewing chronology, Billy Shebar and David Roberts construct a sensory portrait where each fragment converses with the others like a living musical score. From its apparent dispersion emerges a luminous figure: that of a creator who has expanded the limits of the human voice and continues to seek, with wonder, new ways of understanding and inhabiting the world.
Martín Castillo, programming director of FIDOCS 29
Billy Shebar is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker, known for his films 'High Noon on the Waterfront' (2022), starring John Turturro and Edward Norton, which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival and aired on TCM and HBO, and 'Dark Matter' (2007), winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Prize at Sundance and starring Meryl Streep. He collaborated with animator Bill Plympton on the viral New York Times web series 'Trump Bites' (2018–2020) and with animator Yoni Goodman on the crime series 'Doctor's Orders' (2021).
David Roberts is a filmmaker and writer based in New York City. He is a former diplomat and academic physicist. His articles have been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Wall Street Journal, among other outlets.