Experiencing Interruptions?

I Hear America Singing

Set over the final four days leading up to a high-stakes backers' audition, a documentarian named Charon follows Broadway composer Robbie Doerfler and his friends Rose and Roger as he navigates a magical realist liminal space between artistic ambition and existential collapse, culminating in the poignant and thought-provoking question: “Where do we go when we go up — is it Heaven?”

  • Daron Hagen
    Director
    9/10: Love Before the Fall, Orson Rehearsed
  • Talal Jabari
    Director of Photography
    Staged, Full Signal, 9/10: Love Before the Fall, Naila and the Uprising
  • Tevi Eber
    Assistant Director
  • Daron Hagen
    Writer
    9/10: Love Before the Fall, Orson Rehearsed
  • Daron Hagen
    Composer
    Orson Rehearsed, Shining Brow, 9/10: Love Before the Fall, Amelia
  • Kip Soteres
    Producer
  • Robert Frankenberry
    Producer
  • Daron Hagen
    Producer
  • Robert Frankenberry
    Key Cast
    "Robbie Doerfler"
    Orson Rehearsed, 9/10: Love Before the Fall
  • Desiree Soteres
    Key Cast
    "Rose Marie Modjeska"
  • Christopher Scott
    Key Cast
    "Roger Tomchek"
  • Daron Hagen
    Editor
    9/10: Love Before the Fall. Orson Rehearsed
  • Nikola Chapelle
    Sound Recordist
    The King, The Edge of Democracy, The Great Hack, The Wild One
  • Project Type:
    Experimental, Feature, Other
  • Genres:
    Musical, Meta-modernist, Documentary, Meta-fiction, Bardo, Opera, Musical Theater
  • Runtime:
    1 hour 18 minutes 44 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    January 1, 2025
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
  • Montreal Independent Film Festival
    Montreal
    Canada
    Nominee, Best Composer of the Season, Best Independent Film, 2025
  • Swedish International Film Festival
    Stockholm
    Sweden
    Nominee, Best Feature Length Documentary; Best Director; Winner, Best Cinematography, 2025
  • Mindfield Film Festival - Albuquerque
    Albuquerque
    United States
    Winner — Diamond Awards for : Best Ensemble Cast, Best Director, Best Editing, Best Original Score; Gold Awards for: Best Actor (Robert Frankenberry) and Best Documentary Film
  • New York Movie Awards
    New York
    United States
    Winner, Best Original Score, Silver, 2025
  • World Film Festival in Cannes
    Cannes
    France
    Finalist - Best Ensemble Cast, Best American Film
  • Los Angeles Film Awards
    Los Angeles
    United States
    Winner - Best Musical / Dance Film; Honorable Mention for Best Indie Film
  • Alternative Film Festival
    Toronto
    Canada
    Winner, Best Experimental Feature Film
  • Kyoto Independent Film Festival
    Kyoto
    Japan
    Semi-Finalist - Best Musical Feature or Documentary
  • Paris Film Awards
    Paris
    France
    June 1, 2025
    Winner: Best Feature Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay; Gold Award for Best Editing (Daron Hagen) and Best Cinematography (Talal Jabari); Silver Awards for Best Actress (Desiree Soteres) and Best Score (Daron Hagen).
  • WILDSound Film and Screenplay Festival
    Toronto
    Canada
    Winner, Best Feature Film
  • Pageant Film Festival
    Gangtok
    India
    Winner, Best Actor (Robert Frankenberry)
  • Edinburgh Film Awards
    Edinburgh
    United Kingdom
    Winner, Best Original Score
  • Lonely Wolf International Film Festival
    London
    United Kingdom
    Semi-Finalist, Best Comedy or Musical Feature
  • Florence Film Awards
    Florence
    Italy
    Winner, Best Feature Documentary
  • Los Angeles Motion Picture Festival
    Los Angeles
    United States
    ORSON WELLES PLATINUM AWARD for Best Director, Best Writer, and Best Music Score; ORSON WELLES SILVER AWARD for Best Picture
  • 4th Dimension Independent Film Festival
    Bali
    Indonesia
    Nominee - Best Experimental Film
  • Vancouver Independent MovieMaker Awards
    Vancouver
    Canada
    Semi-Finalist - Best Documentary Film
  • New York Independent Cinema Awards
    New York
    United States
    Nominee - Best Composer
  • International Sound and Film Music Festival
    Varaždin
    Croatia
    Nominee - Original Score for a Documentary Feature
  • Malibu Film Festival
    Malibu
    United States
    Official Selecgtion
Distribution Information
  • FilmHub
    Distributor
    Country: Worldwide
    Rights: All Rights
Director Biography - Daron Hagen

Daron Hagen (b. 1961) is an American composer, writer, and filmmaker who established the operafilm genre. His Bardo Trilogy — comprising Orson Rehearsed, 9/10: Love Before the Fall, and I Hear America Singing — streams worldwide, is distributed on Amazon Prime Video, and is theorized in his book, Exploring Operafilm: Making the Bardo Trilogy, scheduled for release by McFarland in March 2026.

Across five decades, Hagen has composed 13 operas, 5 symphonies, 12 concerti, and more than 250 art songs. His works have been commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Buffalo Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra, and Seattle Opera, among others. Collaborators include Leonard Bernstein, JoAnn Falletta, Lukas Foss, Kate Lindsey, Paul Muldoon, Gerard Schwarz, and Gore Vidal.

A Guggenheim Fellow and Lifetime Member of Yaddo, Hagen is founding director of the New Mercury Collective. His honors include two Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residencies, Bogliasco, Camargo, MacDowell, and VCCA fellowships, two American Academy of Arts and Letters awards, and prizes from Columbia University, ASCAP, the Barlow Endowment, and the Kennedy Center Friedheim Award.

He has approached pedagogy as a form of artistic citizenship in posts and residencies at Bard College, Curtis, NYU, the University of Pittsburgh, Princeton Atelier, UNLV, and the Chicago College of Performing Arts. His critically acclaimed memoir Duet with the Past intertwines personal narrative with reflections on creativity and collaboration. Recorded on Naxos, Sony, and others, published by Peermusic Classical, and represented by Encompass Arts, Hagen studied at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Curtis, and Juilliard, and continues to create and direct from his home in upstate New York. As Ned Rorem wrote in Opera News, “To say that Daron Hagen is a remarkable musician is to underrate him. Daron is music.”

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

This film is the final installment of a project called "The Bardo Trilogy," which begins with "Orson Rehearsed," and continues with "9/10: Love Before the Fall." In the trilogy of features I explore, from the stance of an auteur composer-director-screenwriter-editor, the concept of "operafilm" -- a fusing of the procedures and tropes of lyric theater and cinema in a comprehensively correlative fashion in order to achieve a new form of "gesamtkunstwerk."