Program series: adaptation

Isabel is a talented violist trying to find her footing in New York’s freelance classical music scene. She takes on gigs both big and small – weddings, funerals, and eccentric dinner parties – and often finds herself entangled in other people’s private lives. When an ex-boyfriend suddenly reappears and she gets the chance to audition for the New York Philharmonic, surely nothing can go wrong. Or can it?

On a String, which expands on Hagen’s web series Is a Violist, is a charming comedy about ambition, insecurity, and the difficult question of whether one is truly ready to take the next step.

Claire Denis returns with an intense and star-studded drama based on a stage play by Bernard-Marie Koltès, embracing the strict confines of theatrical form. The story is set in a remote construction site in West Africa. Behind tall fences and armed guards live the site manager Horn and the young engineer Cal. On the very night Horn’s new wife, Leone, is set to visit, a stranger appears outside the fence. His name is Alboury, and he has one request: to reclaim his deceased brother’s body. Over the course of a single night, themes of guilt, power, and colonial legacy are interwoven in a dark chamber drama.

François Ozon adapts Albert Camus’ classic novel with gripping intensity. Set in Algeria in 1938, the story follows the enigmatic Meursault, who has just lost his mother but appears strangely unaffected by grief. Drifting through life guided by chance, he is drawn into a fateful confrontation on a sun-drenched beach when his neighbor Raymond runs into trouble.