“The Last Repair Shop” is an astonishing, tender, heartbreaking, inspiring look behind the scenes at the expertise and love that the craftspeople of the instrument repair shop for the Los Angeles Unified School District put into keeping more than 80,000 musical instruments working for kids in the city’s public schools. The school district, the documentary says, “provides freely repaired musical instruments to students, one of the last in America to do so.”
The 40-minute film deservedly won the Academy Award for best documentary short film on March 10. It was directed by Ben Proudfoot and Kris Bowers of Los Angeles’ Breakwater Studios, which also won a 2022 Oscar for the documentary short “The Queen of Basketball.” Proudfoot and his team profess a “humanist” approach to their films that fill in gaps in the stories we tell of our history and get at the great meaning in often unheralded lives.
“The Last Repair Shop” tells a story of refugees—from poverty that leaves a Mexican immigrant single mom unable to buy her kids gifts for Christmas, from anti-Armenian violence In the crumbling Soviet Union, from homophobia that convinces you that you can’t be who you are. They find refuge and transcendence in music—and in the sustaining work of the repair shop in a nondescript warehouse in the heart of Los Angeles where their repairs pass on the gift of music to the next generation. Repairing instruments becomes a metaphor for making people whole again.
“There’s a certain safety, I think, in that shop,” Proudfoot tells me. “There’s a mutual safety. They’ve found each other. They found a place where they can help themselves, but also help others.”
“The Last Repair Shop” is a film about a community that values the arts, a community where art is its identity as well as big business (Los Angeles is the “recording capitol of the world,” the film says), a community that understands that art is also food, that art is medicine.
“This is not just a musical instrument repair shop,” one of the craftspeople, Steve Bagmanyan, says. “When an instrument breaks there is a student without an instrument. No, no, no. Not in our city.”
Related: Director Ben Proudfoot Discusses Technique Behind Oscar-Winning ‘Last Repair Shop’
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