Diplo to Present His Film Project at Beat Film Festival

From June 3 to 8, the Beat Film Festival will take place at the 35mm cinema. This festival showcases new documentary films about music. The focus is on documentary films made in the last two years that have not been released in domestic distribution. Most of the films presented in the program were shown for the first time at key foreign festivals (Berlinale, Sundance, Tribeca, Cannes). They are produced by independent studios from London to New York, where the authors of the films are often both producers and studio owners.

The reference points for the Beat Film Festival are the Danish documentary film festival in Copenhagen CPX: DOX, one of the largest in Europe, which has a separate section Sound & Vision dedicated to music documentaries, and the large American music festival South by Southwest (SXSW), renowned for its focus on new culture, where music group performances are accompanied by world film premieres.

One of the films, Favela On Blast (Visionary from the Slums), will be presented on Saturday, June 5, by the author himself – Wesley Pentz, known by his musical pseudonym Diplo. The film is conceived as a hymn to Brazilian ghettos (favelas), which spawned baile funk – a chaotic mix of music from third-world countries, illegal raves, and fierce funk, around which artists like M.I.A. and Santigold became popular. Diplo is a DJ, producer, and godfather to the two previously mentioned artists. Therefore, it is not surprising that instead of a dry history of the genre, he presents an engaging ethnographic expedition into the slums of Rio de Janeiro, where drugs, sex, and a high level of crime play as much of a role in the formation of baile funk as the music itself.

The film screening schedule is here