8 (2008 film)

8 is an anthology film consisting of eight short films centered on the eight Millennium Development Goals.

Topics

Eight directors had "carte blanche" to treat one of the eight topics:

References

External links

The Letter

The Letter may refer to:

Literature

Theatre

Film

The Letter (opera)

The Letter is an opera by composer Paul Moravec and librettist Terry Teachout. It was commissioned by the Santa Fe Opera and was premiered there on 25 July 2009.

The opera is based on The Letter, a 1927 play adapted by W. Somerset Maugham from one of his short stories. The play has been filmed twice. The first version, called The Letter, was made in 1929 and starred Jeanne Eagels. The better-known 1940 version, also called The Letter, starred Bette Davis and Herbert Marshall and was directed by William Wyler.

The inspiration for Maugham's story and his subsequent play came from a real-life event which took place in Kuala Lumpur in Malaya in April 1911.

Development of the opera

The collaboration

Both Moravec and Teachout made their operatic debuts with The Letter. Teachout began writing the libretto in November 2006 and started posting an ongoing account of the opera's genesis and development on his blog, About Last Night, when the commission was announced by the Santa Fe Opera on May 9, 2007. He describes it as "a cross between a verismo opera like Tosca and a film noir like Double Indemnity or Out of the Past. We don't want The Letter to sound old-fashioned—Paul's musical language is in no way derivative of Verdi or Puccini—but we do want it to move fast and hit hard."

The Orchids

The Orchids are a Scottish band that achieved success with Sarah Records. Formed near Glasgow in 1986, the Orchids released a series of underground singles on the influential Sarah Records (see 1986 in music). The group's line-up comprised James Hackett (vocals), Pauline Hynds Bari (vocals), John Scally (guitar), Chris Quinn (drums), Matthew Drummond (guitar) and James Moody (bass). Their producer, Ian Carmichael, often played keyboards on their records. The group split up in 1995, playing their final gig at the Sarah Records farewell party.

The Orchids were musically one of the most interesting Sarah bands and certainly developed far more on that label than any band except, perhaps, The Field Mice. Starting with a fairly conventional melancholy guitar pop sound on Lyceum and contemporaneous singles, they moved on to become more keyboard and sample/effects-based for their second and third albums, Unholy Soul and Striving For the Lazy Perfection, developing a more electronic sound, possibly as a result of their producer, Ian Carmichael, who was a member of dance band One Dove.