Land of Gold premiered last year at Telluride. Focusing on the development of a few crucial, fraught scenes – a “spider dance” on a massive sequoia stump by San Francisco Ballet star Lorena Feijóo playing Lola Montez and the attempted rape of Mexican barkeep Josefa Segovia sung by the stunning mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges – the film is far more disciplined, focused and entertaining than the production itself. The opera’s conceit is that the main characters were real people, and much of the libretto was taken from historical texts. Shot mostly cinéma vérité style, the film follows rehearsals of the ill-fated 2017 San Francisco Opera production Girls of the Golden West by Pulitzer Prize-winning Berkeley composer John Adams and celebrated director Peter Sellars, who wrote the libretto.īy itself, the film is a concise 73-minute plunge into a talent-laden production that would premiere at three and a half hours. His new film, Land of Gold, makes its West Coast premiere Thursday, April 28, at the Castro Theatre as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival, and it’s his latest documentary immersing viewers in a charged creative environment.

Whether he’s capturing the chaos of the Chicago commodities market or observing the San Francisco Opera’s staging of Wagner’s Ring Cycle from the perspective of the backstage crew, filmmaker Jon Else is a master at revealing the process behind the polished product. Courtesy: After Image Public Media John Else. Almost every moment soprano Julia Bullock is on screen in Land of Gold is electrifying.

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