The 87-year-old is the subject of The Only Girl in the Orchestra, which won Best Documentary Short Film at the 2025 Academy Awards
The Only Girl in the Orchestra, a documentary about US double bassist Orin O’Brien, has won the award for Best Documentary Short Film at the 2025 Academy Awards, which took place at the Dolby Theatre, Los Angeles, on 2 March. The film was directed by O’Brien’s niece Molly.
The 35-minute film focuses on O’Brien’s life as part of the New York Philharmonic’s double bass section, which she joined in 1966 having auditioned for conductor Leonard Bernstein. In doing so, she became the orchestra’s first full-time female musician. According to a 1966 article in Time magazine, quoted in the documentary, O’Brien was ‘the only girl, in fact, in the 104-member orchestra, a situation unique at the Philharmonic, so there is yet no place for her to dress’. She remained a member of the orchestra for 55 years.
The film had already received plaudits at film festivals across the US. It won best documentary short at the Minneapolis St Paul International Film Festival and best short documentary at the 2024 Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards. After its world premiere at the DOC NYC film festival on 9 November 2023, critic Paul Emmanuel Enicola said, ‘Delightfully insightful and criminally short, The Only Girl in the Orchestra serves as a masterclass not only on how to make it in music; but also how to succeed in life.’ He rated the film A-.
The film triumphed over contenders including Death by Numbers, I Am Ready, Warden; Incident, and Instruments of a Beating Heart, which follows first-graders in a Tokyo public elementary school preparing to perform Beethoven’s ’Ode to Joy’ at a ceremony for the new incoming first graders.
Read: Ask the Teacher - Orin O’Brien
Watch: Trailer: New Netflix documentary celebrates the NY Phil’s first full-time female musician
Read: Masterclass: Orin O’Brien on Ginastera’s Variaciones concertantes double bass solo
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