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A ring of black text on a transparent background, reading 'Monday Short'.

Edmonds Jansons' Choir Tour (2012)

It isn't easy to walk the line between irritating and charming, but the singing in Choir Tour pulls it off perfectly.

image reads "CHOIR TOUR, film by edmunds jansons". The background is blue with a skiline of a city. There's a woman character on the right, wearing a red dress, with her hands up and blowing a whistle. On the left are 17 choir boys, all eyes closed and with their mouths open. Thye're all wearing black with blue bow ties. The top of the image is coverd in a light blue grid

NOTE: This Monday short was originally posted on February 6, 2018. We are re-uploading Peter Hemminger's original Monday Shorts until further notice.

Edmonds Jansons' film Choir Tour gets by on one key insight: a group of children may seem like a set of solid objects, but it acts more like a liquid. In his 2012 short, a childrens' choir runs amok through an airport and a hotel. It's not that they're intentionally causing trouble, but like a ball of mercury, they clump together and flow from one space to the next, without any regard for rules or reason.

Jansons shows this all with a minimal, highly compressed style, which was probably the only way to go--you need a certain amount of abstraction to make this particular image work. Credit, too, to the impressive sound design from Girts Biss. It isn't easy to walk the line between irritating and charming, but the singing in Choir Tour pulls it off perfectly.

 

dir. Edmunds Jansons

syn: "It’s a wild free-for-all when a famous boys choir breaks away from their conductor while on 
tour in Seoul and causes mayhem in the hotel." 

2012