Music Films 2011
UNERHÖRT! Music Film Festival Hamburg
Benda Bilili!
The musicians of the band “Staff Benda Bilili” live on the streets of Kinshasa. Four of them sit in strange tricycles. One day a boy joins them. He plays a tin can guitar with only one string. But how. “Staff Benda Bilili” want to make it with their music. But then the house burns down, where some of them live. In their songs they have distinguished between those who sleep on boxes and those who sleep in beds. Now fate is forcing them onto the boxes as well.
Renaud Barret/ Florent de La Tullaye
CG/FRA I 2010 I 84 minutes
Trailer “Benda Bilili!”
(YouTube)
Coals To Newcastle: The New Mastersounds From Leeds to New Orleans
The funk-jazz phenomenon “The New Mastersounds” from Leeds are on their way to the birthplace of funk. Enriched by comments from various master musicians from New Orleans, the film gives a good insight into the lives of these five British professional musicians. It also gives an impression of the city where it all began and which is now fighting to preserve its culture after the destruction by the tornado Katrina.
Aaron Dunsay/ Marca Hagenstad
USA I 2010 I 79 minutes
Trailer “Coals To Newcastle”
(YouTube)
Coming Back For More – Finding Sly Stone
Sly Stone remains one of the great innovators of music. With his band The Family Stone he was one of the absolute highlights at the Woodstock Festival. At the beginning of the 80s he disappeared, seemingly forever, from the scene.
In 2002, Dutch director Willem Alkema began his search for Sly Stone, not without having to overcome various hurdles. In June 2009 the time had finally come. Sly Stone, founder of the Family Stone and one of the most influential musicians of the Funk & Soul movement, gave his first interview in front of running cameras in over 20 years.
Willem Alkema
NL I 2010 I 75 minutes
Trailer “Coming Back For More”
(YouTube)
Music From The Moon
“Music from the Moon” is an intercultural music and puppet show for children. In 2006 the Hypno Theatre set out on a journey to Iceland and remote places in Greenland to perform their show. The film accompanies the group on their journey through arctic landscapes. Exceptional concerts and very personal moments with Emiliana Torrini, Benni Hemm, Dagur Kari and other stars of the Icelandic and Greenlandic music scene are as worth seeing as the magnificent landscape shots of these extraordinary northerners.
Christian Hund/ Carsten Christochowitz/ Uwe Wältring
DE I 2009 I 96 minutes
Taqwacore – The Birth Of Punk Islam
At 17 Michael Knight left his birthplace in Rochester to study Islam in a Koran school in Pakistan. This was his first rebellion – against his violent, schizophrenic, narcissistic father. Years later, burned out by the demands of religious dogma, Michael rebelled again: he wrote the Muslim punk novel “The Taqwacores”. His fictional work immediately found favour with young Muslims worldwide, and in no time actual Taqwacore bands created their own scene.
Omar Majeed
CA I 2009 I 80 minutes
Trailer “Taqwacore”
(YouTube)
Upside Down – The Creation Records Story
Oasis, Teenage Fan Club, Super Furry Animals, Primal Screem, Ride, Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, etc.
Millions of records sold on both sides of the Atlantic, near bankruptcy, “Pills, Thrills, Spats and Prats”, successes, excesses, cheers, breakdowns and of course some of THE songs that have shaped the late twentieth century. This is the definitive and authorized story of England’s most brilliant and chaotic record company.
Danny O’Connor
UK I 2010 I 101 minutes
Trailer “Upside Down”
(YouTube)
We Don’t Care About Music Anyway
The film associates and confronts the work of eight musicians from Tokyo’s new music scene with Japanese society. Through the prism of music, an ambiguous view of contemporary Tokyo is revealed. The bright shop windows of consumer society conceal a disturbing reality. The dream of consumption against the islands of real garbage it produces. The hope for wealth and prosperity against the sad disillusionment of places and people who no longer have any use for them. Unrestricted access to all goods and information against the hectic rhythm of the inhabitants…
Cédric Dupire/ Gaspard Kuentz
FRA I 2009 I 80 minutes
Youssou N’Dour: Rückkehr Nach Gorée
In his search for inspiration, Youssou N’Dour sets out to find the origins of jazz, which are ultimately rooted in the unspeakable horror of the slave trade. He will be accompanied by the blind Swiss pianist Moncef Genoud and the director of the “Gorée House of Slaves” museum, Joseph N’Diaye. The impressions of this journey, which took the singer from Senegal via the USA to Europe, are captured in new songs. The climax is finally Gorée, an island off the coast of Senegal and a symbol of the slave trade.
Pierre-Yves Bergeaud
CH/LU I 2007 I 110 minutes
Trailer “Youssou N’Dour”
(YouTube)