Walker George Films is thrilled to announce that their feature-length music documentary, Young@Heart, has been awarded both a Golden Rose for Best Art Documentary and the prestigious Special Prize, a Golden Rose for 'Best film of 2007' chosen from all film categories at the 47th Annual Rose d'Or Festival in Lucerne, Switzerland. It has also been accepted for the Los Angeles Film Festival in June 2007.
Directed by Emmy-nominated Stephen Walker (Hiroshima, A Day that Shook the World) and produced by Sally George, Young@Heart is a funny, heart-felt feature-length film that follows the Young@Heart Chorus, a group of pensioners aged 73 to 92 years from Northampton, Massachusetts, as they prepare a new show before a thousand people consisting of songs from the likes of The Clash, Coldplay, Talking Heads and Jimi Hendrix. In the mouths of these seniors, the familiar lyrics of rock songs acquire a new poignancy. Their performances explode some of the big taboos surrounding old age: love and sex, loss of youth and loneliness, ill health and - above all - death. The result is an intimate, moving and often hilarious portrait of an extraordinary group of people who may be old in body but simply refuse to grow old in spirit.
This critically-acclaimed film is an unusual mix of observational documentary and musical theatre, which also includes specially shot music videos to the Chorus's versions of the Ramone's I Wanna Be Sedated, the Bee Gee's Stayin' Alive, Talking Head's Road to Nowhere and David Bowie's Golden Years. The result is startling: young people's songs sung by old people in highly unusual settings.