Across The Margin: The Podcast celebrates the unsung heroes who passionately share with others the gift of music through an interview with the co-director of the Oscar-winning documentary The Last Repair Shop, Ben Proudfoot…
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This episode of Across The Margin : The Podcast presents an interview with Ben Proudfoot, a Los Angeles-based filmmaker most noted as the director of The Queen of Basketball, winner of the 2021 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject. With co-director Kris Bowers he also brought to life the short documentary film A Concerto Is a Conversation, which was an Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary Short Subject at the 93rd Academy Awards in 2021. His latest documentary, The Last Repair Shop — the focus of this episode — was the recipient of the 2024 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject.
Once commonplace in the United States, today Los Angeles is by far the largest and one of the last American cities to provide free and freely repaired musical instruments to its public schoolchildren, a continuous service since 1959. The Last Repair Shop grants an all access pass to the nondescript downtown warehouse where a dwindling handful of devoted craftspeople keep over 80,000 student instruments in good repair.
Led by the charming general manager, Steve Bagmanyan, the film introduces a technician from each department. Dana Atkinson, in the strings division, takes us into his personal breaking point as a young man confronting his sexuality. Paty Moreno, in charge of brass and the sole woman in the shop, chronicles her pursuit of the American dream as a Mexican immigrant and single mother. Duane Michaels, a quirky, self-described hillbilly who fixes the woodwind instruments and shares the rip-roaring tale of how his $20 fiddle took him on tour with Elvis. And finally Steve himself, who learned to tune pianos in America after surviving a harrowing escape from ethnic persecution in Azerbaijan in the late 1980s, a conflict again in the headlines today. The film blends the unexpectedly intimate personal histories of the repair people with emotional, firsthand accounts from the actual student musicians for whom their instruments made all the difference.
In this episode host Michael Shields and Ben Proudfoot expound upon what music and access to instruments means to the lives of the children in Los Angeles while considering how the power of music has changed the lives of those who passionately labor in the repair shop. They talk about how the promise of the American Dream manifests itself within the documentary, the message of hope that is abounding in the film, and so much more. Ultimately this episode celebrates an inspiring documentary that serves as a passionate love letter to Los Angeles and to those unsung heroes who gave countless others the gift of music. This is an episode that pays tribute to a truly unique program that has produced countless legends from John Williams to Kendrick Lamar.
Watch The Last Repair Shop here!
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