Sometimes, all a film needs is a captivating personality that the audience will fall in love with – and Jacqueline du Pré was exactly that. Her smile, her magnetic presence, the extraordinary music she drew from the cello, and the fact that her remarkable career was cut short at the age of 28 by serious illness, all contributed to her becoming an admired figure during her lifetime, and even more so after her death.

In the film, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma recounts du Pré’s life story: from her childhood and rivalry with her flutist sister Hilary du Pré, through her unprecedented success and the performances that consistently filled concert halls, to her love story and marriage with Daniel Barenboim (they were married in Israel when they visited during the Six-Day War), and finally to her diagnosis with multiple sclerosis, which left her disabled in her later years.

Du Pré recorded Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto—the work most closely associated with her name—at the age of 20. Eight years later, she was forced to stop playing.