SHORT DOCUMENTARY FILM REVIEW
The Last Repair Shop
- FILM: The Last Repair Shop (free on YouTube/39.48 mins)
- PLAYLIST: Film Soundtrack on YouTube and on Spotify
- ONE SONG: I Thought I Was Broken
- ESSAY: The musical gift Los Angeles offers public school kids by Kris Bowers – the film’s co-producer
11 year-old violinist Porché Brinker is one of several students at the Los Angeles Colburn music and arts school featured in The Last Repair Shop. “If I didn’t have my violin from school,” she says, ” I would probably…I don’t know what I would do. Don’t even jinx me with that!”
THE LAST REPAIR SHOP
Oscar-nominated short documentary shares the healing power of music and the value of arts education
“Music can do wonderful things. Music can change lives. Music can take you off the streets. Music can fill you up with joy, with happiness.”
Steve Bagmanyan, knows what he’s talking about. A key figure in the Oscar-nominated short documentary film The Last Repair Shop, music profoundly changed his life after his family was forced to flee Armenia in the 1980s. In turn, Bagmanyan – a piano tuner by trade – has changed thousands of children’s lives as the supervisor of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s (LAUSD) Musical Instrument Repair Shop.
A moving and intimate 39-minute film, The Last Repair Shop digs into Bagmanyan’s harrowing and compelling back story and those of three of his talented and candid colleagues who work at one of the last instrument repair shops serving public schools in the US.
In the film a number of students from L.A.’s Colburn music and arts school offer testimony to the life-changing value of free access to expensive instruments. 11 year-old Porché Brinker says, “If I didn’t have my violin from school I would probably…I don’t know what I would do. Don’t even jinx me with that!” Another girl says playing saxophone taught her discipline and gave her confidence. A braces-toothed adolescent notes his parents wouldn’t have been able to afford the sousaphone he’s learned to love and play.
Steve Bagmanyan is the supervisor of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s (LAUSD) Musical Instrument Repair Shop. His family fled to the United States from Armenia to escape ethnic cleansing in the 1980s.
The Last Repair Shop shines light on the delicate interplay of people – young and old – and the earnest musical vocation that inspires both the artisans in the repair shop and the young students in their school orchestra. It’s a compassionate and hopeful human story of overcoming heartbreak and obstacles. The film applies the metaphor of instrument repair to the healing power of music.
It resonates through the film like the pure tone of a tuning fork.
“We all have broken relationships, broken promises,” says the film’s co-producer, Halifax-born Ben Proudfoot. “The world is, in many ways, broken. And I think what these people stand for is an optimism that sometimes you can make things whole again with enough effort and care and patience.”
Proudfoot’s co-producer L.A.’s Kris Bowers, who attended Colburn and is an award-winning composer, wrote in a recent L.A. Times essay, “… as the world becomes increasingly chaotic and fractured, young people need an outlet for their feelings now more than ever. Something to make sense of the tangled thoughts and tightly wound sensations that can’t be put into words … they need music.”
The film comes to a joyous and magnificent crescendo as the credits roll over a thundering orchestra of Los Angeles students past and present – their graduation years are superimposed and range from 1966 to 2030. The musicians include members of the repair shop and they are all playing a piece titled The Alumni written by co-producer Bowers.
Students past and present from various Los Angeles public schools play over the credits to close the film.
03 February 2024
