On the 18th of January the most extensive filming in the history of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra ended.

Coming to cinemas in fall 2007!

The RHYTHM IS IT! success-duo Thomas Grube (director) and Uwe Dierks (producer) and their first-rate team have just been travelling through Asia with this old and prestigious orchestra. This historic trip took them back to Beijing after an interval of thirty years then on to Tokyo and Seoul. On the way there, the orchestra also played in the metropolises Shanghai, Taipei and Hong Kong for the first time.

For the orchestra’s 125th jubilee in 2007, TRIP TO ASIA was recorded as a unique document, since the orchestra let a film team shadow it for the first time in its history. This afforded the team a unique chance of studying the artistic and human processes involved and of grasping the psychological mechanisms and social structures at the heart of this outstanding organism.

Never before has one of the world’s top orchestras been filmed to this extent, and to fathom its collective magic the author and director Thomas Grube brought together an international team. The cameramen were Anthony Dod Mantle, U.K. (Dogville, Manderlay, It‘s All About Love, Das Fest, 28 Days Later, Last King of Scotland) and Alberto Venzago, Switzerland (as a Magnum photographer the holder of several international awards like the Robert Capa Award) and René Dame (RHYTHM IS IT!). The sound-artist Simon Stockhausen recorded the trip’s atmospheric sounds, from which he intends to create a musical score. The cutting is once more being done by Martin Hoffmann who formerly was responsible for the cutting of RHYTHM IS IT! which was awarded the German film prize. At the heart of the film there are two of the most important European classical music works in the form of Beethoven’s 'Eroica' and Strauss’ 'Ein Heldenleben'.

TRIP TO ASIA was filmed partly with prototypes of the brand-new CANON XL-H1 and is the first film to result from this first-rate HDV new development. During the Berlinale 2006 visitors were given an exclusive impression of the quality of the filmed material and the forthcoming film in the Canon Dome at Potsdamer Platz. Though the film is still being cut, the first pictures were shown till the 19th of February in the HD cinema inside the Dome and as a 180° projection on the outside.

Like RHYTHM IS IT! (www.rhythmisit.de), TRIP TO ASIA has its own comprehensive website, and the start of the tour on the 1st of November 2005 was the start of both the filming and the website www.triptoasia.de. The contents (a diary of the trip and production, photos and sound collages) can be viewed by logging in, and they are kept up to date by musicians, the director and the film-team, to enable fans to follow the process of the film’s development up to the premiere.

The German premiere of TRIP TO ASIA, to be distributed by Piffl Media, is planned for the fall of 2007.