Liberto!

United Kingdom 2026
French
16 Minutes

Director
Max Keegan

Produced By
Max Keegan Tom Edgerton, Dwight Jantzi

Featuring
Liberto Planas

Eighty-five year-old master luthier Liberto Planas has a ten year waiting list for his instruments… and he is still taking orders. Liberto! is a multimedia portrait of an artisan at the height of his powers.

Liberto was born in Franco’s Spain in 1940 in the poor coastal town of Almería
to working class parents. When he was seven years-old, Liberto heard virtuoso
guitarist Narciso Yepes on the national radio station, the only station in Spain at
that time. He played the concerto Aranjuez. From this moment on Liberto spent every
evening watching the neighborhood guitar player.

At the age of 11 he walked three days to Granada unaccompanied to start his apprenticeship under a master guitar maker, building in the style of that region. At 17, he had completed a prizewinning instrument. He had learned all he could from his old teacher. He walked to Mirecourt in North-Eastern France an ancient centre of European lutherie. His family had given him the little money they had to make the trip. Upon seeing Liberto’s instrument, the director of the guild declared ‘a guitar is nothing but a Camembert box with a neck on it… you have no business here goodbye.’

Liberto was too ashamed to return to his family in Spain, instead he walked over the alps to Cremona, the hometown of Stradivari where he was accepted and learned to build violins. Since leaving Cremona in the mid 1960s Liberto has taught instrument
building all over the world, from Cuba to North Korea. In 1990, by then a master himself, Liberto set up his own workshop in the historic Parisian district of Montmartre.

Liberto! takes places across the mediums of film, photography and text. The film, divided into three sections, which can be shown as one short film or interspersed with essay, and punctuated by photographs as a multimedia online piece.

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