Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus
Neo Sora / Japan / 2023 / 103 min
20 compositions, five decades, one performance. With posterity as his only audience, the Japanese star composer strums his own musical testament on the keys in the last performance before his death. Intimate, majestic and minimalistic, captured by the maestro's own son.
It has been almost a year since the legendary Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto passed away after a long battle with cancer. A few months before, he decided to leave the world with one last performance, his own curated swan song of a concert filmed in beautiful black and white. Just him and a piano and no dialogue, but with 20 compositions from his long back catalogue, ranging from his pop star days in Yellow Magic Orchestra, to film scores for the likes of Bertolucci and the award-winning ‘Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence’, and up to his meditative last album ’12’. A musical autobiography unlike any other, performed on the piano, and touchingly and gently captured by his own son.