New Orleans Film Festival 2009

Jose Antonio Abreu used his love for music to help ordinary children find a way out of the trappings of Venezuela's pitfalls of dire poverty. His project started in 1975 and threehree decades later his movement has bloomed into a full-fledged public works program that several countries around the world now want to copy and implement. El Sistema shows how Abreu’s astonishing ideas result in a most improbable social project that has come to embrace all of Venezuelan society. A complex film, its beauty is in showing the emotions of the various children who now have found a way out of the violence and poverty.