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Il Teatro Rosso

Il Teatro Rosso is an eclectic musical film developed by cinematographer Huei Lin in collaboration with composer Steven Kazuo Takasugi and musicians from NO HAY BANDA. The work integrates strategic lip-syncing, false spatialization and purposeful perceptual misguidance, all in order to achieve a “house of mirrors,” where live & recorded, real & virtual, truth & falsity become confused, and where likewise performer becomes observer and audience the observed. Il Teatro Rosso is programmatic, representational, narrative, provocative, confrontational, humorous, then not at all humorous, all to accommodate a social and political message current with our contemporary technological culture and humanity in a time of mass consumption, crisis and transition.

  • Huei Lin
    Director
    Kara Toprak (Black Earth); Chinatown Tea Leaves
  • Noam Bierstone
    Producer
  • Steven Kazuo Takasugi
    Composer
    Sideshow
  • Sarah Albu
    Key Cast
  • Geneviève Liboiron
    Key Cast
  • Émilie Girard-Charest
    Key Cast
  • Lori Freedman
    Key Cast
  • Felix Del Tredici
    Key Cast
  • Daniel Áñez
    Key Cast
  • Noam Bierstone
    Key Cast
  • Gabriel Dufour-Laperrière
    Sound director
  • Project Type:
    Experimental, Music Video
  • Genres:
    Experimental, Music, Abstract
  • Runtime:
    51 minutes 44 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    March 17, 2025
  • Production Budget:
    170,000 CAD
  • Country of Origin:
    Canada
  • Country of Filming:
    Canada
  • Shooting Format:
    4K
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
Director Biography - Huei Lin

Huei is a filmmaker and author from New York City. His work is known for blending the abstract and the deconstructed; his images are often crafted from street scenes, fragments of light beams and the raw expressions of his subjects.

In 2016, he was an artist-in-residence at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity; his collaboration with the Indigenous Leadership Conference and musicians from the band Pink Martini produced an acclaimed short film “Black Earth,” set to the music of Turkish composer Fazıl Say. In 2020, Huei directed the music video for “Messiah/Complex,” featuring Canadian opera star Rihab Chaieb and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra; this project received widespread critical praise (and also managed to offend a number of Handel purists). Huei previously worked at the noted documentary studio EyeSteel Film, and directed the documentary film “Chinatown Tea Leaves” (2021).

As an author, he has released a number of short stories and a full-length collection entitled Coda. His stories chronicle his own New York City childhood, reinterpreted as surreal puzzle boxes full of delirious, fleeting relationships. Two of his short stories were selected as semifinalists and finalists in the The William Faulkner Literary Contest and the Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award Competition. His work has been featured in The New York Times.

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Director Statement

For Il Teatro Rosso, I wanted to create a timeless visual universe for the musicians of No Hay Banda to inhabit. Unrestrained colors, theatrical stagings and video fragments. The musicians are the cast, performing Takasugi’s musical epic from a vaudevillian showroom. The result is a “visual soundtrack” which follows the music; an inversion of the relationship between film and film score. The images contained in this film are woven into a fictional world both familiar and remote, nostalgic but askew. Our world is a “red theater”- but when we pull back the curtain, what will be see?