The Story
I Hear America Singing (2025) is an internationally-laureled, groundbreaking operafilm by Daron Hagen and part 3 of his Bardo Trilogy. In it,, Robbie Doerfler, an aging Broadway composer experiencing an artistic and existential crisis aims to jumpstart a professional comeback by gathering his two best friends to rehearse a revised revival of the musical revue that originally launched his career twenty years prior. As the trio swaps songs under the pressure of an impending backer's audition they are hounded by a hostile documentary film crew led by a filmmaker named Charon. The film functions as a structural meta-narrative on the weight of aging, artistic compromise, and the unreliability of memory.
“Hagen has crafted something genuinely post-genre, a work that honors opera, indie cinema, and documentary while subordinating all three to a fiercer commitment: bearing witness to the artist as mortal being, to creativity as both salvation and self-immolation. In an era of algorithmic content and demographic targeting, Hagen's Bardo Trilogy stands as bracing proof that cinema can still be alchemical, dangerous, genuinely new. This is operafilm as terminal diagnosis and love letter, Whitman's America singing itself into beautiful, necessary extinction..”
- Adrián Pérez, Lonely Wolf Review
