Candy

Carin Goeijers | Netherlands | 2022 | 82′ | OmeU

As one of the few female solo saxophonists, Candy Dulfer is a star of the international pop-jazz-funk scene. The daughter of Dutch jazz saxophonist Hans Dulfer, who has played her instrument since early childhood, is at home on all stages of the world. In Holland she fills giant halls. The film accompanies her for several years through her everyday life as a professional musician. Insights are also given into her private life: her patchwork relationship, her separated parents. All of this is underpinned with archive images, some of them specially recorded, including earlier collaborations, for example with Prince.

Then suddenly the pandemic comes, and we can watch how, while living under lockdown conditions, work and personal matters become even more intermingled – between album productions in virtual home recording sessions and the effort to wrest both parents from the danger of loneliness. The result is not only the portrait of a dynamic, ambitious woman, but also the milieu description of an important part of the pop business, a machinery that has to react to a crisis situation.

In the end, this operation tries to return to a normality that is not quite clear what it will be. Candy will be on stage at a major European open-air festival with funk legend Nile Rodgers, making music with him in the flesh for the first time, after the two had previously only been able to exchange digital data for a song collaboration and also only meet in virtual space.