OP Creative Director Brian Staufenbiel is spending several weeks in Seattle directing a new film production of Jonathan Dove's Flight with Seattle Opera.
Initially, Staufenbiel was commissioned to direct the live version of OP's 2017 production of the opera chronicling the nearly two-decades-long forced residence of Iranian refugee Mehran Karimi Nasseri at Charles de Gaulle airport. "Telling this story in the medium of a film produced with rigorous social-distancing protocols demands a nod to the COVID pandemic," Staufenbiel explains.
Touching on the resonance of Flight in today's world of pandemic-related social distancing, Staufenbiel says, "We have been plunged into a hundred-year event that has left hundreds of millions sequestered and exhausted. It is perhaps easier now to feel, viscerally, what it was like for Nasseri to be isolated and even ostracized, what the world would be like if no one would come close to you and wrap their arms around you and whisper in your ear, 'I love you.'"
