Running tonight through Monday is the 1st Annual Chicago International Music and Movies Festival, taking place at various venues around town including the Chicago Cultural Center, Th!nk Art Salon, and the St. Paul Cultural Center.
The bulk of the lineup is comprised of documentary films about music (along with some narratives) alongside panel discussions and musical performances. The films come from or take place in locations as varied as Sydney, Detroit, Halifax, Brazil, Mongolia, Israel, France, and India via Africa and Texas, encompassing genres as equally varied as Cajun, soul, rap, indie rock, and Scandinavian blues. Some have a satirical bent but many focus on musicians struggling against adversity either as individuals or in groups, such as punks in the former GDR and the Sidi community in India.
Many of the films are either world, U.S., midwest, or Chicago premieres, including films on Sonic Youth, Neil Innes, Wilco, and Johnny Thunders, The Eternity Man (the latest from The Filth and The Fury director Julien Temple), and Sixteen Days in China, a documentary about the Chinese underground music scene by Martin Atkins, ex-P.I.L. member, Columbia College lecturer, and author of Tour:Smart.
Atkins will be one of many filmmakers on hand to take part in Q&A sessions as well as panels such as “The Future of Music.” Another panel, “The Greatest Rock Movie Ever,” will be attended by Lech Kowalski (director of cult fave punk doc D.O.A.), whose latest project, Camera War, billed as a “crisis cinema party” and new live cinema narrative in collaboration with Swiss experimental music composer Mimetic and Geneva-based VJ and software designer Boris Edelstein, promises to be a festival highlight.
Tonight’s "pre-opening night party" includes a screening of Todd P. Goes to Austin (in which the titular character, a D.I.Y. booking agent from Brooklyn, takes on SXSW with a bunch of bands in tow) and a performance by Chicago’s Percolator. Other special events during the festival include an exhibition of rock and roll photography by Richard Bellia and a retrospective of San Francisco music video collective Encyclopedia Pictura.
-Dan Mucha
The bulk of the lineup is comprised of documentary films about music (along with some narratives) alongside panel discussions and musical performances. The films come from or take place in locations as varied as Sydney, Detroit, Halifax, Brazil, Mongolia, Israel, France, and India via Africa and Texas, encompassing genres as equally varied as Cajun, soul, rap, indie rock, and Scandinavian blues. Some have a satirical bent but many focus on musicians struggling against adversity either as individuals or in groups, such as punks in the former GDR and the Sidi community in India.
Many of the films are either world, U.S., midwest, or Chicago premieres, including films on Sonic Youth, Neil Innes, Wilco, and Johnny Thunders, The Eternity Man (the latest from The Filth and The Fury director Julien Temple), and Sixteen Days in China, a documentary about the Chinese underground music scene by Martin Atkins, ex-P.I.L. member, Columbia College lecturer, and author of Tour:Smart.
Atkins will be one of many filmmakers on hand to take part in Q&A sessions as well as panels such as “The Future of Music.” Another panel, “The Greatest Rock Movie Ever,” will be attended by Lech Kowalski (director of cult fave punk doc D.O.A.), whose latest project, Camera War, billed as a “crisis cinema party” and new live cinema narrative in collaboration with Swiss experimental music composer Mimetic and Geneva-based VJ and software designer Boris Edelstein, promises to be a festival highlight.
Tonight’s "pre-opening night party" includes a screening of Todd P. Goes to Austin (in which the titular character, a D.I.Y. booking agent from Brooklyn, takes on SXSW with a bunch of bands in tow) and a performance by Chicago’s Percolator. Other special events during the festival include an exhibition of rock and roll photography by Richard Bellia and a retrospective of San Francisco music video collective Encyclopedia Pictura.
-Dan Mucha
1 comments:
Thanks for the great info...very
comprehensive reporting on the leading edge of current film and music scene.
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