When Rhombus Media producer/director Larry Weinstein first heard Lost in the Stars, a 1985 audio release of a collection of Kurt Weill songs, he envisioned a performance documentary. In 1994, he completed September Songs: The Music of Kurt Weill.

The performance doc features an international cast of characters – the likes of Lou Reed, Nick Cave, Mary Margaret O’Hara, PJ Harvey and Teresa Stratas – and, like so many other Rhombus projects, has been sold around the world.

The film was coproduced with Germany’s zdf and other international partners, including arte, pbs in the u.s., Portugal’s rtp, Holland’s nos, Germany’s zdf, yle in Finland and svt in Sweden.

International contacts are crucial to Rhombus, especially since its films – often performance-related – generally require higher budgets than other documentaries.

‘A lot of our strongest international ties were formed at a time when our ties at home were at their weakest, and we were very lucky we could survive through some of that time,’ says Weinstein.

‘A lot of people want high-quality programs,’ he continues, ‘but they can’t afford to do it themselves, so these international coproductions are a convenient way to participate in a good program.’

September Songs is an unusually theatrical and dramatic piece for Rhombus, a production house known for classical music and performance documentaries.

‘The music of any project dictates its style,’ says Weinstein. ‘Weill was a composer of theater music and we were inspired by various theatrical phases of his life.’

Despite the fact that September Songs is a bit of a departure for Rhombus, selling it has been a smooth process.

‘We didn’t have a problem selling it because we have such strong contacts internationally,’ says Weinstein, adding Weill’s persona may well have something to do with its success. ‘If we had done this with Beethoven, it wouldn’t have been so easy,’ he says.

Weinstein set the 90-minute film in a gigantic warehouse space in Toronto and signed celebrated theater art director Michael Levine to the project.

‘The idea of setting it all in one big turn-of-the-century warehouse that we could transform into many different spacesÉwe thought there was something wonderfully Brechtian (about it),’ he says.

It’s a highly stylized production which the director confesses bears some resemblance to a high art rock video. ‘I didn’t want to get into fast cutting and cross cutting as they have in rock videos,’ says Weinstein, ‘but if you put this film in fast-forward, I suppose it’s like one long rock video.’

The ‘best new market’ on the block for Rhombus is Bravo!, says Weinstein, and the new specialty channel is already involved in producing the company’s latest project, a doc about another Brechtian composer, Hanns Eisler.