Serge Ioan Celebidachi’s The Yellow Tie, a life of his father, the Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache, with John Malkovich and Ben Schnetzer, has its UK premiere in Leicester Square.
The Yellow Tie, Serge Ioan Celebidachi’s film about his father, the conductor Sergiu Celibidache, has its UK premiere at the Odeon Luxe in Leicester Square on Wednesday 30 September 2026.
John Malkovich plays the conductor in his later years. Born in Christopher, Illinois, in 1953, he was a charter member of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company in 1976 and won an Emmy for Biff in Death of a Salesman. Places in the Heart and In the Line of Fire brought him two Academy Award nominations, and Dangerous Liaisons, Being John Malkovich and Burn After Reading followed. Ben Schnetzer plays the younger Celibidache, with Sean Bean as his father, Demostene, and Miranda Richardson and Kate Phillips as his wife, Ioana, at two ages.
The film follows Celibidache from a boyhood under his father’s authority in Romania to Berlin, where he studied composition and conducting and, after the war, led the Berlin Philharmonic while Wilhelm Furtwängler awaited denazification. He was music director of the Munich Philharmonic from 1979 until his death in 1996, and he refused to release commercial recordings in his lifetime, holding that music belonged in the concert hall.
His son wrote the screenplay with James Olivier, Peter Menzies Jr. shot it, and the score draws on Bruckner, Berlioz and Brahms. The film opened in Bucharest in November 2025, and Icon Film Distribution releases it in British cinemas on 9 October.