The Murder of Halit Yozgat
21-year-old Halit Yozgat was assassinated in broad daylight, in his immigrant parents’ internet cafe on April 6, 2006 in Kassel, Germany. Five witnesses were present in the 77 square metre space when Halit was shot twice in the head. With his unconventional combination of sound art, electronics, and dark metal, Frost brilliantly and sensitively musicalizes the structural racism and institutional blindness that affects the country's immigrant communities.
In the middle of the rehearsal process, work on the world premiere of The Murder of Halit Yozgat had to be suspended due to COVID-19. Instead, Ben Frost, with Trevor Tweeten, resumed rehearsal and released a film about the project. The result is a unique cinematic portrait on the borderline between documentation and fiction – a chilling opera film about the reconstruction of a murder case.
A film by Ben Frost and Trevor Tweeten
The movie is commissioned by Staatsoper Hannover, a production by Ben Frost, Toby Donnelly and Staatsoper Hannover in cooperation with Holland Festival.
The opera The Murder of Halit Yozgat, based on the counter investigation 77sqm_9:26min by Forensic Architecture, is commissioned by Staatsoper Hannover, a production by Staatsoper Hannover in cooperation with Schauspiel Hannover and Holland Festival.
composed by — Ben Frost & Petter Ekmann
directed by — Ben Frost
libretto by — Daniela Danz
Musical Direction by — Florian Groß
choreography by — Sasha Milavic Davies
with — Sabrina Ceesay, Mathias Max Herrmann, Nicolas Matthews, Tahnee Niboro, Gudrun Pelker, Yannick Spanier, Hubert Zapiór
scenic design by — Lisa Däßler & Mirella Weingarten
sound design by — Carlos Boix Larrey
costume design by — Kerstin Krüger
dramaturgy by — Yvonne Gebauer, Friederike Schubert
Run Time — 120 minutes
Language — German and English with Subtitles
Team
Ben Frost
Ben Frost (Director & Composer) is a Composer, Producer, Sound Artist and Director. Born in Melbourne, Australia in 1980 and based since the early 2000’s in Reykjavík Iceland, Frost was mentored by Brian Eno in the Rolex Arts Initiative. Frost is known for his minimalist, instrumental and experimental music with influences ranging from classical minimalism to punk rock and black metal. His work includes the studio albums Theory of Machines (2007), By The Throat (2009), A U R O R A (2014) and The Centre Cannot Hold (2017) and spans an array of other forms including installations, live performance, scores for dance, theatre, and various studio collaborations. He has composed several scores for film including the Palme d’Or nominated Sleeping Beauty, the series’ Fortitude and Dark. Most recently he composed the score for Raised By Wolves with director Ridley Scott.
Over the past decade, Frost has collaborated most extensively with the Irish visual artist Richard Mosse, producing the award-winning multi-channel video and sound installations The Enclave (2013) and Incoming (2017) which on display at SFMOMA in February this year. Frost’s directorial debut The Wasp Factory (2013, Holland Festival 2014), was performed to capacity audiences at London’s Royal Opera House. Frost also recently joined the touring lineup of the band SWANS with whom he has previously collaborated in the studio.
Daniela Danz
(Librettist) was born in Eisenach in 1976. She studied art history and German and wrote her Ph.D. thesis on the construction of hospital chapels in the Weimar Republic. She is director of the Schiller House in Rudolstadt and teaches creative writing at the University of Hildesheim. She has published three volumes of poetry, Serimunt, Pontus, and V, and two novels, Lange Fluchten and Türmer.
