Heinz Strunk, plagued by crater-like skin rashes, lives with his sick mother in Hamburg-Harburg in the 1980s. As a saxophonist, he tours the North German lowlands with the dance combo "Tiffanys". In this bizarre universe of Korn, Klaus & Klaus and Koteletts, bandleader Gurki teaches him how to deliver cheerful, upbeat music. To escape the vicious circle of shooting festivals and village weddings, Heinz wants to start a solo career and become a hit producer...
The "requerimiento" was a declaration by the Spanish monarchy of Castile’s divine right to take possession of the New World’s territories and to subjugate, exploit and, if necessary, fight the native inhabitants. This film explores the aesthetics of a mythological time and its archetypical creatures and materialities. Following the trajectories of a serpent and the fragment of a meteorite, "Requerimiento" develops an interwoven narration questioning human and nonhuman alterities in different epochs and cultures.
As a sci-fi obsessed woman living in near isolation, Beverly Glenn-Copeland wrote and self-released Keyboard Fantasies in Huntsville, Ontario back in 1986. Recorded in an Atari-powered home-studio, the cassette featured seven tracks of a curious folk-electronica hybrid, a sound realized far before its time. Three decades on, the musician – now Glenn Copeland – began to receive emails from people across the world, thanking him for the music they’d recently discovered.
Unustatud rahvad (1970 - 1989) by Estonian composer Veljo Tormas is based upon six Balto-Finnic peoples traditions. Collegium Musicale choir brought the songs to different sides of Baltic coasts to liven current citizens connections for fleeting past and strengthen their identity.
The story of Nisar Ahmed Khan, told through his children and the people he served, a spiritual guide whose followers still visit his tomb on his birth and death anniversaries. And alongside how his family spends a few days at the village keeping his traditions alive.
A single female voice sings of waiting in her garden for her ‘dark-eyed sailor’ to return from war, bearing the other half of their token, a gimmel ring. Three veterans pass on the road as she waits, and she asks them: “When you were fighting in distant lands, did you think of the home you left?” In reply the veterans relate their recollections. The garden images in the accompanying film represent ‘home’, but also stand for a more general possibility of redemption, of the potential of the past to return at any time, disguised and changed, to renew the present: “Each moment of time is a garden gate,” the song goes, “Through it my love may walk.”
This television special is a first for the reclusive singer with the BBC documentary gaining new interviews with Young, nine months apart in New York and California. The documentary also looks back over the singer's archives, with some never-seen-before material.
Paris To Kyiv’s Fragmenti recording was originally released in 2005, a sonic tapestry of ancient Ukrainian song fragments and contemporary sounds. Nearly 11 years later, after circulating throughout the roster of artists on Balanced Records, a remix album has been compiled featuring electronic and avant garde interpretations by Ken Gregory, Joe Silva, Rise Ashen, Kasm, J57, Solidaze, Cayetano, Miguel Graça, Trevor Walker and Anders Peterson. This film accompanies the remix by Joe Silva.
Every year in June, the small Bulgarian village of Balgari celebrates St Constantine with a special ritual. Initiated ‘nestinari’ go into a music-induced trance and dance on bonfires in a display of religious passion.
A documentary film about the origins of the Basque trikitixa. It reflects how the small accordion brought by one of the Italian workers who came to build the Madrid-Paris railway tunnels in 1859, starting from Zumarraga, has become a symbol of contemporary Basque music.
A vacuum repairman moonlights as a street musician and hopes for his big break. One day a Czech immigrant, who earns a living selling flowers, approaches him with the news that she is also an aspiring singer-songwriter. The pair decide to collaborate, and the songs that they compose reflect the story of their blossoming love.
Documentary about the blacklisted folk group The Weavers, and the events leading up to their triumphant return to Carnegie Hall.
Wirklich alles?!
When asked to make a documentary about her friend’s mother—a Parisian astrologer named Juliane—the filmmaker sets off for Montmartre with a Bolex to craft a portrait of an infectiously exuberant personality and the pre-war apartment she’s called home for 50 years.
In March 2005, Neil Young was diagnosed with a brain aneurysm. Four days before he was scheduled for a lifesaving operation, he headed to Nashville, where he wrote and recorded the country folk album Prairie Wind with old friends and family members. After the successful operation and recovery period, he returned to Nashville that August to play at the famed Ryman Auditorium, once again gathering together friends and family for this special performance.
Starting from frame by frame in-camera editing, the film translates a nursery garden from Chillán into a filmic landscape, with a rhythm and structure coming from a personal relationship with color, light and occurrences that took place near the end of the summer at the Olaxis garden. This is the first part of a work which takes reference from Violeta Parra's poetry, created from flowers, plants and certain places of the Ñuble area.
Joni Mitchell has been called the queen of folk music and one of the biggest pop stars of the 60s and 70s. Even today, her lyrics and unique guitar style continue to inspire new generations of singers and songwriters.
During a decade rife with paranoia, in the middle of the McCarthy era, Music Inn was a bold experiment. Halfway between the Second World War and The Civil Rights Movement, Phil and Stephanie Barber created an oasis in the Berkshire Hills in Western Massachusetts where aspiring musicians came to learn from the very best. Students and faculty, young and old, rich and poor, white, black, and brown convened together and learned from each other. Defying the surrounding environment, Music Inn harbored a racial and cultural harmony where music was all that mattered.
In this interview, conducted for the Criterion Collection in 2014, Elijah Wald, who collaborated with folksinger Dave Van Ronk on his memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, discusses the people and places central to New York's Greenwich Village folk scene of the late fifties and early sixties - a scene transformed by the arrival of Bob Dylan.
The meeting point between two comunication media: A letter written in 1929 -hidden inside the adobe walls of an old country house - and the shooting of the coutryside along the highway that connects two Chilean cities un 2018.