"I heard him before I saw him: Who was listening to the Opera at 2pm on a weekday in the middle of the tropics?" asked filmmaker Taneisha Berg, before chasing down the powerful tenor voice in her distance to ask why he was singing Opera. "He laughed a little. Perhaps thrown off by my rude interruption, he answered simply, 'Because I love it.'"
That love and the unlikeliness of this Ivorian man's story are what spawned Berg's The Tenor From Abidjan, a feature-length profile in the works on self-trained virtuoso Landry Assokoly. Chronicling the 24 year-old Assokoly's journey from his hometown of Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, to Europe's conservatories, Berg documents the young student/aspiring tenor's road to becoming an international Opera star. Below catch a glimpse of Landry, the Abidjan tenor, and head over here for more details on Taneisha Berg's The Tenor From Abidjan, which is currently in pre-production.
