Beat Film Festival-2011

In early June, Moscow will host an international festival of new documentary films focused on music and contemporary culture, the Beat Film Festival. As in the past year, its main venue will be the cinema "35mm." An educational program with festival guests will take place at the Institute of Architecture, Media and Design "Strelka." There will also be night screenings under the open sky.
Beat Film Festival sees its task in promoting new ways of documenting contemporary culture and telling important phenomena in music and culture through the language of cinema. The festival program includes films shot in the last two years that have not been released in Russia. Most of them premiered at key international festivals: Berlinale, Sundance, Tribeca. Thus, in 2010 the festival opened with the film "Stones in Exile," which was first shown just two weeks earlier at the Cannes Film Festival. This year, the festival will open with the film "Hit So Hard: The Life & Near Death Story Of Patty Schemel" — a brilliant portrait of 90's heroes, composed by the drummer of the band Hole, recently shown at the New Directors/New Films festival in New York this April.
The festival program this year includes films from the USA, UK, France, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, and Poland; all screenings in Russia will be premieres. As part of the festival, a gala premiere of Casey Affleck's directorial debut "I am Still Here" will take place, one of the most discussed films of last year on the edge of documentary and feature films. The film about actor Joaquin Phoenix, an Oscar nominee for his role as Johnny Cash in "Walk the Line," who decided to leave his acting career and start rapping.
The honorary guest of the festival is renowned German director Romuald Karmakar, whose works have repeatedly been awarded at festivals in Venice and Locarno, and this year he chaired the jury of the New German Cinema at Berlinale. Within the Beat Film Festival, he will present the so-called "Club Trilogy" about nightlife in Berlin and Europe as a whole, culminating in the film "Villalobos," first shown in the program of the Venice Film Festival in 2009. This is a kind of world premiere, as these three films have never before been shown as a complete trilogy. Romuald Karmakar's visit is supported by the Goethe-Institut in Moscow.
In addition, Polish directors Wojciech Słota and Leszek Gnoiński will arrive at the festival to present their film "Beats of Freedom," which tells how young people passionate about rock music contributed to the overthrow of the communist regime in Poland — and, moreover, a fine example of modern documentary filmmaking, which examines the phenomenon of counterculture against the backdrop of the country's history. The filmmakers will conduct a masterclass at "Strelka" and explain why the theme of 1960s-1980s counterculture seems relevant in today's socio-political and cultural realities. Their visit is supported by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.
On Friday, May 27, a preview of the festival will take place — the so-called secret screening of the film "High on Hope" by Piers Sanderson with the support of the free email service Windows Live Hotmail. The secret screening will be organized on the same principle that Secret Cinema organizes its secret film showings in London and New York — the audience remains unaware of the location and time of the screening until the very last moment. The secret screening does not sell tickets — to get in, you need to send an email to [email protected] from an account registered on www.hotmail.com and receive instructions on how to get to the screening of the film that reconstructs the atmosphere of the first British raves.
PROGRAM OF BEAT FILM FESTIVAL 2011
The Ballad Of Genesis And Lady Jaye / directed by Marie Losier / USA, France, 2011 / 70 min.
Berlinale Teddy award winner for best documentary winner, two special mentions at Cinema Du Reel – PRIX LOUIS MARCORELLES and PRIX DES BIBLIOTHEQUES Official selection of Berlinale, Tribeca, Cinema Du Reel, Hot Docs, Sheffield Doc/Fest
An incredible love story of Genesis P-Orridge and his wife Lady Jaye, who played with him in the band Psychic TV — a story that hardly conveys anything new about the nature of industrial music but certainly about the nature of humanity and P-Orridge's nature in particular. New York artist Marie Losier conceived and started shooting this film seven years ago — she visited their apartment in New York, shot Genesis cooking, and Jaye with bunches of parsley and a cat on 16mm film, dressed them in silly costumes, toured with Psychic TV, and observed how love makes a person give up their personality, dissolve in another person, and become one with their beloved, using William Burroughs's cut-up method; when Lady Jaye passed away in 2007, Genesis got a tattoo of her almost across his whole arm and still says "we" instead of "I."

Hit So Hard: The Life & Near Death Story of Patty Schemel / directed by P. David Ebersole / USA, 2011 / 101 min.
Official selection of New Directors/New Films, SXSW, Sheffield Doc/Fest
Hit So Hard is the story of those who survived the 90s, told from a first-person perspective: Patty Schemel, drummer of the "golden" lineup of the band Hole, openly lesbian and friend of Kurt Cobain, shot over forty hours of 8mm video back in the early nineties. With Cobain holding his daughter, Courtney Love strumming something on guitar, and Patty herself reading aloud the final Rolling Stone issue of 1994 (the main takeaway — Hole itself), all of this laid the foundation of Hit So Hard, in which P. David Ebersole brilliantly reconstructs not only Patty's story, Seattle, and the band Hole at the peak of their fame but also the entire hopeless, dormant, and still incredibly appealing 90s generation.

High On Hope / directed by Piers Sanderson / Britain, 2010 / 72 min.
Leeds IFF Audience award winner, In-Edit Barcelona Best Film award winner
Chronicles the emergence and establishment of the most significant subculture of the 90s — the first British raves in Blackburn, which evolved from local parties to a national scale disaster: it was the first and last time when thousands-strong raves in abandoned hangars were seriously discussed in Parliament, and the evening news hosts had to learn to pronounce the phrase “acid house.” The main prize of the In-Edit festival in Barcelona, the audience award at the Leeds festival.

I'm Still Here / directed by Casey Affleck / USA, 2010 / 108 min.
Official selection Venice IFF
Casey Affleck's directorial debut is a film about how actor Joaquin Phoenix, nominated for the Oscar for his role as Johnny Cash in "Walk the Line," decides to leave his acting career and starts rapping, painfully stepping on what seems to be every possible rake and eventually wandering into the unknown, waist-deep in water. The fact that Casey Affleck was later exposed for most of the filming being staged only attests to Joaquin Phoenix brilliantly playing himself.

Beats Of Freedom / directed by Wojciech Slota, Leszek Gnoinski / Poland, 2010 / 73 min.
Official selection Sheffield Doc, Karlovy Vary IFF, SXSW
Formally — a film subtitled "How to Overthrow a Totalitarian Regime with a Homemade Amplifier," a tour through the almost unknown here Polish rock music from the early 60s until the fall of the Eastern Bloc; in reality — a powerful, incredibly engaging (even though partly based on recently declassified materials of the special services) portrait of an era against the backdrop of the country's history when just one Rolling Stones concert in Warsaw in '67 jeopardized the entire activity of Soviet propaganda. A ton of interesting details emerge — in particular, the Palace of Culture and Science, the "Stalinist" skyscraper in the center of Warsaw, a "gift from the Soviet Union to the Polish people," was a recording studio for one of the most anti-communist Polish rock bands. But the main discovery — is the music itself: mostly wildly contemporary, and in no way inferior to any extremely relevant current archival groups like Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark.

Separado! / directed by Dylan Goch, Gruff Rhys / Britain, 2010 / 84 min.
CPH:DOX Sound & Vision award winner Official selection of SXSW, BAFICI, CPH:DOX
Gruff Rhys, the vocalist of the psychedelic British band Super Furry Animals, embarks on a journey through Patagonia to find his distant, mysteriously disappeared relative, also a musician — during which he willingly resorts to the magical properties of a Power Ranger helmet, travels on the roof of his car, and holds concerts in a field for wild horses. Partially a documentary film, partially a witty invention, resembling a road movie, "Separado!" is primarily a story about how one’s roots should sometimes be sought in one’s own imagination. This, of course, does not prevent Rhys from roaming through South America, seemingly meeting all the remarkable locals on his way and conducting an entertaining educational session not only on low-fi electronics but also on local history.

Upside Down: the Creation Records Story / directed by Danny O’Connor / Britain, 2010 / 101 min.
Official selection of Hot Docs, SXSW, London IFF, Goteborg IFF
The story of Creation Records — the most influential British label of the late past century — is largely the story of its indefatigable founder Alan McGee, whose business strategy was always based on what he had consumed the night before. However, he is the one who introduced the world to groups like Primal Scream, My Bloody Valentine, and Oasis. McGee discovered the latter in a pub where the band was giving its second-ever performance, purely by chance: by being late for a train — however, his selection policy always carried a subjective character, having met with Bobby Gillespie back in school. True to McGee himself, this is an extremely capricious, if not comical film, nostalgically looking back at 90s Britain when its tastes were ruled by geniuses and outsiders, talented eccentrics and adventure-seeking rogues.

Backyard / directed by Árni Sveinsson / Iceland, 2010 / 70 min.
Special mention of CPH:DOX jury
A man named Arni Runar, a tall, slightly caricatured Icelander, decided to hold a festival in his yard based on his studio the size of a guard hut; he invited friends (including the director of the film), sent several letters inviting neighbors, stocked up on rubber boots in case of rain — and created a festival that perfectly characterizes Icelandic music both in spirit and content: all that's missing for completeness is Björk, everyone else, including Mum and Belfast FM, is present. This story, once again confirming that enthusiasm is sometimes rewarded in the most unexpected ways, is also quite a touching portrait of Iceland in general — so small that the second or third group of the country can easily perform in someone’s backyard, hiding under an umbrella.

CLUBLAND TRILOGY Romuald Karmakar's Club Trilogy
196 BPM / Germany, 2002 / 60 min.
A panoramic look at Berlin's Love Parade of 2002 from three different perspectives, each of which forms a separate novella. The first, "Intro," shows what happens through the eyes of people standing at the entrance to the club Linientreu; the second, "Gabba," immerses the viewer in the thick of the crowd at the Breitscheidplatz square, where DJ turntables are set up even at a kebab shop. And the third, "Hell at Work," gives a comprehensive insight into how DJ Hell mixes records during his set at WMF. The film premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2003.

Between the Devil and Wide Blue Sea / Germany, 2005 / 90 min.
An astonishing odyssey shedding light on the European electronic scene of the 2000s, shown at many international film festivals, such as the festival in Locarno and Sonar festival. The music speaks for itself here — there are no interviews in the film, only long shots of live performances ranging from the club Cocoon in Ibiza to cramped London venues. The camera captures both somewhat well-known figures — T.Raumschmiere, Alter Ego, Captain Comatose, as well as less obvious people — however, the main point is not the names, but the accurately conveyed feeling of participation in everything happening on this scene. Best German documentary of 2005 according to ARTE channel.

Villalobos / Germany, 2009 / 110 min.
The last film of the trilogy, the magnum opus of Romuald Karmakar, premiered in the main program of the Venice Film Festival. Ricardo Villalobos appears here not so much as one of the most sought-after DJs but as a visionary of the world of contemporary music — Karmakar explores not the phenomenon of Villalobos's popularity but how his mind works, what happens in his setup when he mixes one track with another, how this music is born and what techno-house has to do with Mussorgsky.

Details on the official festival site: beatfilmfestival.ru