Music Films 2012
UNERHÖRT! Music Film Festival Hamburg
A Day With Tortoise
In March 2011 the American post-rockers of TORTOISE had a gig in Santiago de Chile. They didn’t even stay in the country for 24 hours – nevertheless a very concentrated and stylish concert film was created. Between the performed songs you can see hypnotically beautiful landscape shots, and you can hear shreds of self information of the band members.
Sergio Castro San Martin
CHILE I 2011 I 60 minutes
Trailer “A Day With Tortoise”
(YouTube)
Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels Of A TRIBE CALLED QUEST
Hollywood actor meets hip hop legend: Michel Papaport (a.o. “Prison Break”) traces the path of A TRIBE CALLED QUEST from its beginnings to late reunion attempts. The result is a band biography which is lovingly and relentlessly the detailed and at the same time exciting, which is simply REAL!
Michael Rapaport
USA I 2011 I 98 minutes
Trailer “Beats, Rhymes & Life”
(YouTube)
Children of Inkisi – Musical Rushes
The Congolese director and producer Gilbert-Ndunga Nsangata and the Colombian producer and cameraman Gabriel Amdur operate from Barcelona with their joint company TALATALA – this is what committed media work in the global age looks like.
For several years, the two have been shooting a long-term observation about street children in the small town of Inkisi in the Democratic Republic of Congo (180 km southwest of the capital Kinshasa, on the border with Angola). A 50-minute version entitled NINOS DE INKISI / CHILDREN OF INKISI tells the story of Blanchard, Chagui, John, Mambueni and Chance, who live on Inkisi’s main street, Rue Prince.
Gilbert-Ndunga Nsangata/Gabriel Amdur
COD/ESP I 5 minutes
Das Lied Der Dinge – Vier Konzerte Und Ein Piano Mit Helmut Bieler-Wendt
The composer and music educator Helmut Bieler-Wendt is accompanied in four of his space/sound explorations. Sounds are given images and become structures on several tracks. Between the site visits, ZKM graduate Menrad places sequences of Bieler-Wendt’s examination of a grand piano in front of a black background that swallows up space.
Nils Menrad
DE I 2011 I 51 minutes
Trailer “Das Lied Der Dinge”
(Vimeo)
Die Taktstürmer
DIE TAKTSTÜRMER, these are three unknown musicians from Berlin (they could also come from any other city). Driven by their dream, they dare the difficult path into the professional pop business – in their own way. Their different phases of life reveal personal, comic-tragic insights into the everyday life of “normal” musicians in Germany. Soon the assertiveness of each individual artist meets the hard reality of our society, where you can become anything – as long as you manage it.
Nico Sommer
DE I 2011 I 88 Minuten
Trailer “Die Taktstürmer”
(YouTube)
E Dreda Ser Angolano
The scene activist collective Radio Fazuma is making a fictional radio show about the very real conditions in its territory, Angola’s capital Luanda. Starting out from the local Conscious Rap and the global ghetto tech sound Kuduro that dominates here, the film taps into a spectrum of vital forms of expression, with a surprisingly intimate relationship to wacky lyricism. In this way, it illustrates the everyday madness of an urban region whose contrasts range from slums without electricity to districts with the world’s most expensive real estate prices.
Radio Fazuma
ANG/ POR I 2009 I 65 minutes
Fritz Hauser_Klangwerker
A journey into the musical world of Fritz Hauser. We see the drummer, performer, composer and sound researcher in the creative process of three projects: 1) solo at rehearsals with the director Barbara Frey; 2) in the radio studio of DRS 2 developing a musical radio play; 3) on the big stage with the dance company Heddy Maalem, where Hauser’s scraping, scratching, wiping, grinding, rubbing, brushing forms the resonance space for young dancers from all over the world.
Erich Busslinger
CH I 2011 I 61 minutes
Lagos – Notes Of A City
Director Wenkel worked for three years for “Doctors without Borders” in Lagos. Together with DEFA-DOK cameraman Plenert, he describes typical life in the megacity across all social classes. Not a music film in the strict sense, and yet Fela Kuti’s legacy runs like a thread through the entire film. Kutis Afrobeat remains inseparably linked to the denunciation of grievances.
Jens Wenkel
DE I 2011 I 93 Minuten
Left England Shake
Reportagefotograf Seamus Murphy illustriert die zwölf Songs von PJ Harveys letztem Album gleichen Namens von 2011. Anfänglich baut sich eine Stimmung melancholisch-trotzigen Patriotismus auf. Mit fortschreitender Dauer öffnet sich der Blick, wird das Weltbild komplizierter, bis einen am Ende das Gefühl beschleicht, eine ziemlich passende Beschreibung globaler Zustände in Zeiten von Kriegen erlebt zu haben – nicht nur durch Murphys Bilder, sondern auch durch die Musik der Polly Jean Harvey.
Seamus Murphy
UK I 2011 I 52 minutes
Offenes Atelier: Mary Bauermeister
The avant-garde of the international art and music scene gathered in Mary Bauermeister’s Cologne studio from 1960 to 1962. Karlheinz Stockhausen, Hans G Helms, David Tudor, John Cage, Christo, George Brecht and Nam June Paik organized unconventional concerts of “latest music”, readings, exhibitions and actions at her invitation. Mary Bauermeister’s pre-fluxus activities contributed significantly to the development of the Cologne art scene. The artist, who experienced her international breakthrough in New York in 1962, married the world-famous composer and theoretician of New Music, Karlheinz Stockhausen, in 1967 (with him and his first wife Doris she had previously lived for several years in a “ménage à trois” .)
Katarina Stankovic
DE I 2011 I 47 minutes
Ornette: Made in America
Portrait of the free jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman by the independent cinema icon Shirley Clarke, whose last film not only introduces an extremely independent artist, but is itself in its making a manifesto for creative freedom. We see a brand new 35mm print after the film was freshly restored for MILESTONE. (The New York DVD label has been touchingly taking care of re-releases of independent – especially American – cinema since 1990).
Shirley Clarke
USA I 1988 I 77 minutes
Trailer “Ornette: Made in America”
(YouTube)
Sack Über Kopf Nach China
Uwe Bastiansen, Hamburg punk veteran, ex-downward, now Stadtfisch-Kopf and many more, was on a trip to China in 2010. With partly planned and many spontaneous (music) performances he has rendered outstanding services to the German-Chinese friendship – a picture sheet of a loving confrontation.
Uwe Bastiansen
DE I 2010 I 15 minutes
Trailer “Sack Über Kopf Nach China”
(YouTube)
Sog Nit Keinmal – Chinese Music In The Global Age
“If you want to know if a country is well governed and well-mannered, listen to its music.” So Master Kong, whom we know as Confucius, spoke 2500 years ago. But what is the state of the Middle Kingdom? This is the question Sebastian Brunnlechner has dealt with. The philosophy and sinology student used a one-year study stay in China to establish contacts with the music scene there.
S. Brunnlechner/ A. Dalferth/ P. Schmincke/ H. Weil
DE/CH I 2011 I 81 minutes
Preview “Sog Nit Keinmal”
(Vimeo)
The Ballad Of Genesis And Lady Jaye
A film about Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, known through Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, and his life and work partner Lady Jaye (born as Jacqueline Breyer). One might expect a film about the history of industrial music, about Genesis as a link between the pre- and postpunk era, about the underground since the 1970s. It is, but it is told from the perspective of a great romantic love story that began in the 1990s. Genesis and Lady Jaye begin to become one through operations, a third, a pandrogynous.
Marie Losier
USA/FRA I 2011 I 75 minutes
Trailer “The Ballad Of Genesis”
(YouTube)
The Feral Voice
The vocal artist Phil Minton visits the Feral Choir in Cologne. “Feral” means “wild” in English, here it is about the liberation of the voice, thus also the ear.
Pavel Borodin
DE I 2012 I 18 minutes
Yangon Calling
There are them, the punks of Yangon, formerly Rangoon, the capital of Myanmar, formerly Burma. If you can’t imagine what punk attitude has to do with resistance because of inflationary references in recent years, you will quickly be reminded of it here. The radical-individualistic middle finger puts the conditions in a country that is currently experiencing a political thaw to the test.
Alexander Dluzak/ Carsten Piefke
DE I 2012 I 65 minutes
Trailer “Yangon Calling”
(YouTube)