The Ring of the Nibelung is said to be cursed. As Sarah Derendinger films its creation at the Opéra de Paris from within, the myth of the opera begins to echo disturbingly in the lives of the creative team.

​

Paris, February 2020. An international creative team begins rehearsals at the Opéra de Paris for Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung — four operas, sixteen hours of music. Swiss video artist and filmmaker Sarah Derendinger has been part of Calixto Bieito’s team for fifteen years. In this production, she takes on a double role: developing the video imagery for the stage while turning her own camera toward what unfolds behind it.

In March 2020, in the middle of rehearsing Alberich’s curse scene, the process is abruptly interrupted. The opera house closes, and the team disperses. When the Ring resumes years later, it does not return to the same world. Budgets are tighter, casts more fragile, the pressure greater. What was once sustained by trust and shared certainty has become unstable.

Sarah follows the ensemble through rehearsal rooms, technical crises and opening nights — through restart, exhaustion and subtle shifts in loyalty and power. Calixto Bieito, Rebecca Ringst, Bettina Auer, Ingo Krügler, and the singers attempt to complete this monumental work under altered conditions. In doing so, the film reveals how the ensemble itself begins to transform from within.

The film follows this process through to the Ring Festival in 2026. Wagner’s leitmotifs of renunciation, curse and redemption resonate within the real-life creative process of the team, without being explained. The result is an ensemble film about art as a social and emotional process — about what a shared vision demands of those who pursue it, and what remains when it comes to an end.