Since Aznavour received his first camera from Edith Piaf in 1948, that filming became a part of his daily life. The singer kept a video diary where he recorded key moments of his life, travels, concerts, lovers and friends. Before he died he expressed the desire to make a film out of this material. Fulfilling his wish, Marc di Domenico accesses these personal files, while filming himself the French singer for 3 years.
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The usual is for the cameras to be directed at them, the singers, the actors, the men and women who climb up to the stage and fill up the screens. One of the biggest names within the french songs and music, son of Armenian refugees that journeyed through the XXth century and crossed into the next one certain that only death could stop him (and only her would indeed force him an early retirement, at 94 years of age, in the year 2018), Charles Aznavour was first and foremost a singer, but he also filled screens, as we’re eternally reminded by that “Shoot the Piano Player” in which Truffaut made him lead character right at the beggining of the nouvelle vague eruption. “Aznavour by Charles” shows us Charles Aznavour, the star, making something beyond the usual. In 1948, Edith Piaf offered him a recording camera. In the following 34 years, Aznavour filmed landscapes and faces, anonymous people, the women of his life, other stars like himself. Marc di Domenico dived into that huge archive and shaped it. Romain Duris made himself Aznavour e gave voice to his thought. A revealing movie came out of it. The observer becomes the observed thing, and vice-versa. “Aznavour by Charles”, Charles is Aznavour. (Mário Lopes)
This is a travel through the improvised music in Portugal, in particular Lisbon, with focus on the now closed bar Irreal. Based on interviews and filmed concerts with artists like Gabriel Ferrandini, Adriana Sá and Lantana, Chaos and Affinity shows us a cultural reality not well known. And also, a group of artists and venues where this improvised music takes place. Pedro Gonçalves directs his first feature film.
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One of the strengths of Pedro Gonçalves’ documentary is its contemporaneity. Most documentaries about music focus mainly on bands, artists or movements that no longer exist or whose golden moment occurred in the past. Chaos and Affinity tells us about the here and now. A portrait of improvised Portuguese music, with a greater emphasis on Lisbon and with an epicenter in the, ironically extinct, bar Irreal. Pedro gathers a group of incredible musicians, rescuing them from their invisibility through concerts and interviews. An object for future memory in what is his first and promising film. (Carlos Ramos)
The electroacoustic composer Beatriz Ferreyra is a pioneer of early musique concrète during the 50’s and 60’s. Here she discusses her ‘sound hunting’ recording techniques, sound montage and spatialization, in a film full of creaking doors and barking dogs.
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IndieMusic allows for these discoveries. Beatriz Ferreyra, Argentine composer and sound hunter, pioneer of concrete music in the 50s and 60s, as well as Pierre Schaeffer, with whom she collaborated. In this wonderful little documentary, we enter the world of Beatriz, in her ideas and thoughts about sound, explained with practical actions of creaking doors and barking dogs. Aura Satz films everything very close to her, showing her body, her movements, her hands, passing the materiality of the doors, noises and sounds to the film. (Carlos Ramos)
Back in 1986, Beverly Glenn-Copeland, wrote and self-released Keyboard Fantasies, in Huntsville, Ontario. Despite its innovating folk-electronica hybrid sonorities, the cassette was forgotten. Suddenly, three decades later, a rare-record collector in Japan reissued the album and finally the music found its listeners. The musician, now Glenn Copeland, starts its first international tour at the age of 74.
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Keyboard Fantasies is not a popular record – not even to those into the spectrum between folk and ambient. When listening to it, with more or less attention, we learn very little about Beverly-Glenn Copeland. The way the musician balances his beats, as well as his silences and his tender voice, don’t gives us any hint about his life as one of the faces of the never-ending fight for the LGBT rights in Canada 70s, a time when it was still punished by law. If we can admit that his music stays in our minds for its balance, we can say that it’s with the same stability that Beverly tells us about his life and the record that was only valued three decades after its first edition. A story of struggling, courage and spiritual wisdom, teaching us that “We are ever new”. (Filipa Henriques)
In mid-late 1960s and early 1970s, Laurel Canyon was the epicentre of the counterculture. Many musical events took place there and many rock stars lived at that place. Alison Ellwood’s documentary uses rare videos, outtakes, demos and photos in order to pull the curtain on that mythical period, make us go back in time and explore the stories of musicians like Mamas and the Papas, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, The Doors or Frank Zappa.
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Somewhat bigger than a neighborhood and smaller than a city. It watched closely the Los Angeles metropolis, but the orography and the surrounding nature acted as a protection from it. In the 1960s, Laurel Caynon was one of the epicenters of the musical American counterculture that defined the decade. Impressive as it may seem, it seemed everyone found a home, shelter and inspiration there: The Mamas And The Papas, The Doors, Love, Franz Zappa, Joni Mitchell, The Monkees, Neil Young and Stephen Stills’ Buffalo Springfield, Gene Clark and David Crosby’s Byrds – therefore, also Crosby, Stills & Nash. Them and those who came, guided by them, which could be The Beatles, Bob Dylan or Dennis Hopper.
“Laurel Canyon: A Place In Time” tells us, as the title goes, the story of a time and a place. Someone calls it “the garden of Eden”, but this is a garden made of electric sounds and the ambition to create in those mountain houses a new reality – free, creative and brotherly. Then came Charles Manson, time passed by, success corrupted brotherhood and youth experienced an heads-on collision with life outside that idyllic bubble. The fascinating and inspiring Laurel Canyon was inevitably doomed to fail, but that, in fact, only adds to the romanticism of the echo we still hear calling from the distance. (Mário Lopes)
Unlike samba or bossanova, Brazilian electronic music has not been gathering too much attention cinemawise. This documentary tries to fill that gap, tracing an historical path that starts with the pioneer experiments of Jocy de Oliveira and Jorge Antunes in the 60’s and goes until today, with the work of musicians like Alexx kidd or Savio Lopes. The film also features the music of some important electronic artists like Anvil FX, Loop B. or Apollo Nove.
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In the 1960s, Jocy de Oliveira and Jorge Antunes had their first experiences in the world of electronic music in Brazil. The two pioneers could not imagine the influence that their compositions would cause in future generations. Over the decades, electronic music became popular and became a lifestyle and a state of mind. While musicians dominate as constantly evolving technologies, they also reflect on the relationship between human and machine. (Mickael Gaspar)
In the eighties, José Pinhal recorded a couple of cassettes and then he was forgotten. It was only in 2000 that people started to listen to his music again, turning him into a myth of the popular Portuguese music.
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José Pinhal was a stranger in the crowd: a mysterious musician from Santa Cruz do Bispo that only left us a few songs for us to imagine his life. We are left with his delicate word and what, with it, José sings to us: tales of unrequited love for a woman with long hair and red lips. José Pinhal’s repertoire is an endless ode to love, to summer, to forgiveness. If love is endless in his music, José lives now forever in A Vida Dura Muito Pouco, our belated recognition. (Filipa Henriques)
Billie Holiday is a North American jazz legend. At the end of the sixties, while preparing a biography that was actually never written, the journalist Lipnack Kuehl taped more than 200 hours of interviews with other musicians, but also family members, friends and lovers of the singer. James Erskine accesses this material to direct a film about her life, while restoring key performances and other archive footage into colour for the first time.
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We know how the story goes. It is, after all, of one of the voices of the XXst century that we are talking, the woman who carried jazz’s history within herself and turned that knowledge into the expression of a life of artistic glory and private turmoil. Billie Holiday, born in 1915 and taken away by a life of abuses and excesses in 1959, at 44 years of age, was admired by Duke Ellington, a decisive influence in Frank Sinatra, a troubled reflection of the transparent Ella Fitzgerald.
Starting in 1970, journalist Linda Lipnack Kuehl, who was aware of all that, devoted nine years of her life to know more. Aiming towards the writing of a biography, she amassed 200 hours of interviews with friends, lovers, agents, family members or musicians like Count Basie or Sarah Vaughn. Linda Kuehl, who truly is the other main character here, died in tragic circumstances before concluding her book. Seeing the words she recorded grouped together with the enlightening archival footage, her work becomes somehow fulfilled. “Bilie” is the full portrait. (Mário Lopes)
A journey around Lisbon’s suburbs through the lives of a handful of musicians. Different generations and backgrounds meet, Angola to São Tomé, Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau represented by old-school musicians and young producers.
Emmanuel Chanda is a Zambian gemstone miner who was the lead singer of Witch, the country’s most popular rock band of the 1970’s. In 2016, Dutch artist Jacco Gardner visited Zambia to meet, play and record material together with him.
Isabel Aboim Inglez’s colorful animation recollects, frame-by-frame, her childhood memories of cowboys battling indians in the ‘Condor’ magazine.
A intimate portrait of the Swans, from their roots as a post-punk band through their ill-fated bid at mainstream in the 90s indie-rock goldrush, through breakups and chaos to their current status as one of the most accomplished bands in the world.
In Portugal, João Ribas is synonymous with punk music. He propelled many important Portuguese bands and influenced many young musicians. This is a portrait of a man made by those who worked with him and who were his friends and family.
The untold and ultimately inspiring story of legendary singer, Teddy Pendergrass, the man poised to be the biggest R&B artist of all time until the tragic accident that changed his life forever at the age of only 31.
Urban abstraction as a stimulus for the understanding of false movement.
Horn player, bandleader, innovator. The man with a sound so beautiful it could break your heart. Again and again, he broke with convention, and his bold disregard for tradition, his clarity of vision, his relentless drive, and constant thirst for new experiences made him an inspiring collaborator to fellow musicians and a cultural icon to generations of listeners. It made him an innovator —from bebop to “cool jazz,” modern quintets, orchestral music, jazz fusion, rock ‘n’ roll, and even hip-hop. The film features unseen footage, studio outtakes, and rare photos.
Film director Aya Koretzky murders one of the masters of the electromagnetic repetition applied to musical sound.
