New Film to be Released About Shostakovich's Life

The movie will be an adaptation of Julian Barnes' novel "The Noise of Time"

A film adaptation of The Noise of Time, a 2016 novel by the Booker Prize-winning author Julian Barnes, is set to begin production in January 2025. The movie, which will star August Diehl in the title role, follows the life of composer Dmitri Shostakovich as he negotiates the successive Soviet dictatorships of Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev.

Diehl, who has also appeared in films such as Inglourious Basterds and A Hidden Life, will star opposite the Oscar-nominated actor Andrea Riseborough (Birdman, To Leslie), who will play Shostakovich's wife Nina.

Two-time Oscar-winning screenwriter Christopher Hampton will be in charge of adapting Barnes' novel, while Polish director Jan Komasa (who previously worked on the Oscar-nominated film Corpus Christi) will be the film's director.

The film's narrative begins in 1936, when Shostakovich first became subject to state censorship. An anonymous review of his popular opera Lady Macbeth of Mtensk appeared in the Soviet newspaper Pravda, denouncing his work as "formalist," "bourgeois," "coarse," and "vulgar." It was rumored that Stalin himself had written the article, and while this is highly unlikely, he almost certainly was aware of it and approved of it.

Barnes's novel re-visits Shostakovich's life at two other points: while he is undertaking a post-war propaganda tour of the United States, and much later in his life, when the elderly composer is forced to join the Party and serve as chairman of the Russian Federation Union of Composers.