Movie title about moving a piano

March 19, 2011 12:20 PM

Movie title filter. I need help remembering a title. In the movie, there's a scene where a group of people moved a grand piano over difficult terrain. Possibly a combination of forest (or jungle) and mountain. It might have been South America or Africa. There might have been missionaries, or a church, in the story, but I'm not sure. There might have been a building made of glass in the jungle, but I may be confusing that with another movie.

I don't remember anything else about the plot. But the piano moving scene made such an impression on me that I'd like to see the movie again. This was from 10 to 15 years ago. I don't believe it is The Piano. As I recall, the piano was a small plot element and not central to the movie I'm trying to remember.

posted by daikon to media & arts (10 answers total)

Fitzcarraldo?
posted by Guy_Inamonkeysuit at 12:21 PM on March 19, 2011 [1 favorite]

I'm going to go with Oscar and Lucinda, although they moved a glass church through the jungle and not a piano. Weird, mostly sad flick.
posted by Glinn at 12:38 PM on March 19, 2011

I haven't seen it since it came out (1986), but maybe there was a piano in The Mission? There were certainly some oboes...
posted by Paris Elk at 12:47 PM on March 19, 2011

Didn't this also happen in the The Piano? The piano movie part...from beach to inland New Zealand I think...which involved jungle and mountains. No building made of glass though.
posted by victoriab at 12:52 PM on March 19, 2011 [2 favorites]

It's not Fitzcarraldo. That was boat, mountain, jungle, opera house. No glass, no piano.
posted by fixedgear at 1:00 PM on March 19, 2011

Your description made me think of The Mission but I feel like that was a violin.
posted by doublehappy at 1:16 PM on March 19, 2011

And this was bothering me so I googled a bit and found this great (recent) real life news article about a Colonel taking a grand piano to a remote Amazon tribe.
posted by doublehappy at 1:21 PM on March 19, 2011 [1 favorite]

Sounds like The Piano. Not sure about the building of glass--I haven't seen it since it was in the theater.
posted by thinkingwoman at 1:22 PM on March 19, 2011

Wow, this has been quite the illustration of how memory plays tricks, plus the power of AskMeFi. Doublehappy's finding of the real life article is exactly what I was looking for. Turns out it was a story I heard on NPR (or maybe BBC). When I read the article just now, it all came back to me, including the location of Guyana, and the fact that the piano had been donated. It made such an impression on me at the time that I had a visual image of the piano being moved, and was convinced it was a movie I'd seen. I'm sitting here smiling and shaking my head.

Oscar and Lucinda was the movie I was thinking of with the glass church (which as it turns out had nothing to do with the piano story).
posted by daikon at 1:50 PM on March 19, 2011

A little bit more digging (I'm at work now so I don't have the link) suggests that the BBC documented this journey in a show/documentary called The Mission, which might show why a couple of us thought of the 1986 film, too, and might explain why you have the visual.
posted by doublehappy at 4:08 PM on March 19, 2011