Filmmaker Sheila Hayman’s new documentary, “Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn,” premiered last month in London, takes as its subject Hayman’s great-great-great-grandmother, the prolific composer Fanny Hensel. The film provides the rare experience of viewing a documentary devoted to one woman composer, its thorough research portraying Fanny as both a musical genius who composed masterpieces and a woman oppressed by a man’s world.
After her 2010 documentary about Hensel’s brother, Felix Mendelssohn, Hayman searched for material to make a film about Hensel, and found it in the recent discovery of the composer’s “Easter” Sonata, a manuscript that many had mistaken as a work of Felix’s. Hayman and I talked about what it was like to work with an all-women crew, how she relates to Hensel’s artistic struggles, and why women artists need more “creative heroes.”
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