ORCHESTRATED is a documentary charting the story of the first full-time African American symphony orchestra, in the context of a century-long Black struggle for equal place in classical music. It follows pianist, activist and professor, Kyle Walker, on a quest to uncover the lost traces of this audacious project.
ORCHESTRATED follows classical pianist, activist and NYU professor, Kyle P. Walker, on a quest to uncover the lost traces of this audacious project, to connect to living witnesses, and to understand why this important chapter of our shared history has been excluded from the history books. To lift the stories of the Negro Symphony Orchestra musicians out of oblivion, Kyle Walker teams up with conductor Alexander Walker of the Royal Academy of Music in London, to search for the Orchestra’s traces. Alex is a no-nonsense Brit and a single dad, who has dedicated his life to the discovery of unjustly forgotten composers. He transcribes a manuscript for Ignatz Waghalter’s “New World Suite” unearthed from an attic in Queens, New York. The piece was composed for the Orchestra and set to premiere in December 1939 at Carnegie Hall. The dream of this big debut was quashed by the systemic racial bias of the era.
Unflinching and driven, Kyle recognizes that the archives are thin, and oral testimonies are few, but he believes that these musicians “committed themselves to the radical vision that the classical stage should be open to everyone and music belongs to all of us.” Determined that their memory not remain hidden from history Kyle and Alex decide to finish the Orchestra’s quintessential project nearly 85 years later by staging the “New World Suite” at Carnegie Hall with an orchestra of color.
Writer/director Natalia Iyudin works with the themes of oppression and personal freedom, both in the narrative genres of sci-fi and horror, and her nonfiction work.
Her short films screened worldwide — most notably The Garden, starring Sophia Lillis (Adults, Sharp Objects) — and in 2019, she made her directorial TV debut for the CW and Netflix with showrunner Vera Miao's "Two Sentence Horror Stories", starring Nicole Kang (Catwoman, Swallow) and Jim Parrack (True Blood).
Natalia developed multiple series including Girly, with Rashida Jones and Refinery29; directed for mental health campaigns around teen suicide and opioid crises; and on several projects for Toyota. She also co-created and directed We Got You, an award-winning digital series with Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter of The Roots.
A graduate of the Directing Program at the Krzysztof Kieslowski School of Film & Television in her native Poland, Natalia is also a seasoned film and TV editor, and a programmer, and has worked with MTV, BET, PBS, Vogue, MoMA, Film Society of Lincoln Center, National Gallery of Arts, BAM, Sony Pictures Classics among others.
Producer - Nicholas Weissman
Advisor/EP - Sam Pollard
Creative Supervisor/EP - Ross Kauffman
Producer - Kashka Glowacka
Director of Photography/Writer - Bongani Mlambo
