The cinema "Mir" will host an international festival of documentary films about music
From October 10 to 14, the cinema "Mir" will host the international festival of documentary films about music and modern culture Beat Weekend. The program of this year included six major hits of the Moscow Beat Film Festival 2018, whose heroes were the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, the British singer MIA, the group Depeche Mode, a gang of skateboarder girls from New York, Instagram bloggers and stars of independent hip-hop from Nas to Pusha T.
Matanghi / Maya / by M.I.A by Steve Loveridge will open Beat Weekend in Kazan - the turbulent story of a girl from Sri Lanka who traveled from the London ghetto to a superstar known as M.I.A. a graduate of St. Martins College, a Tamil rights activist, by the mid-2000s, the singer became a pop star of a global scale. The director was running Maya all over the world, filming concerts and episodes with his family to eventually turn 7,000 hours of video into an hour and a half film and, most importantly, caught the gist: her rebelliousness always had good reasons, and intricate psychedelic outfits had roots.
Another hit of this year is “Basquiat: The Explosion of Reality” (Boom For Real: The Jean-Michel Basquiat) dedicated to the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat on the eve of his universal recognition and commercial success. Director Sarah Driver managed to subtly convey the atmosphere of the place and time in which the future art-hero was formed. Bohemian parties of the late 70s-80s, the first large-scale hip-hop gatherings and bombed out graffiti trains: Jean-Michel is a guest at every get-together, the creator of the opening day in a clothing store, a graffiti artist writing on buildings in New York under the pseudonym SAMO, a music lover and really homeless. He is not yet familiar with Andy Warhol and has not yet appeared on the cover of The New York Times, but has already acquired his own unique style and language.
Skate Kitchen - the story of the eponymous New York gang of girls skateboarders who rush through the streets of sunny, crowded New York, regain their place in the skateparks and argue that they can ride better than guys. The director turned out not only to show the subculture of the inhabitants of the skateparks, but also a drama about growing up, friendship and finding oneself. The film was warmly received at the Sundance festival, and American media described it as the twin sister of Lena Dunham's Girls and Larry Clark's “Children”: an interesting combination of real and fictional, autobiographical and artistic. Teen life with its fake drive was the perfect storyline for a youth film with an incredible soundtrack from young indie performers ABRA, Khalid, and Kali Uchis.
Depeche Mode: 101 by the great American director D.A. Pennebijker is a cult film about a concert that Depeche Mode was given in Pasadena in 1988. It became 101st as part of their tour in support of the album Music for the Masses - a record, after which the band finally became a global phenomenon. But the picture is remembered not only because of the music: first of all, it is a fascinating movie about how Depeche Mode fans live during the many months of their idols; in fact, a real reality show, filmed 15 years before the flowering of this genre.
The black culture researcher Sasha Jenkins became famous for his film “On Style” about the mutual influence of hip-hop and street fashion. In his new film Word - Law (Word Is Bond), he describes how modern rap originated in the southern Bronx, which in several decades turned from a marginal genre into a mainstream. But most of all, the director was interested in hip-hop poetry: in an interview, he admitted that he wanted to show “how clever are those who composed these lines”, hinting at the stars who were invited to the film. Titans Nas, Rakim and Big Daddy Kane and the most interesting young performers like Run The Jewels, Pusha T, Anderson Pak and Vince Staples talk about hip-hop in the film.
Jonathan Green's “Social Animals” (Social Animals) talk about camera-centric youth culture, power and popularity in which it is built around Instagram accounts. The director was not going to expose and preach: first of all, he was interested in the personal stories of three heroes — the crazy photographer Humza, the model Keylin and the usual student Emma — and the role of Instagram in their lives. A successful business, a way to increase social capital, a reason for harassment - in different contexts the same application can make a person happy or bring him to tears. And there can be no universal advice on how to survive in the new digital era.
In addition to the main program in the framework of the Beat Weekend will be held discussions, public-currents and parties, thematically related to movies. So, on October 10, in the Mir cinema, before the screening of the film “Matangi / Maya / M.I.A”, co-founder of the No Kidding Press Publisher and curator of writing courses Write Like a Grrrl in Kazan Svetlana Lukyanova will tell how the experience of refugee becomes the starting point for artistic expression.
On October 11, Luiza Nizamova will hold a lecture (Contemporary Art Gallery of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts) "What does street art say?" On October 12, the Depeche Mode concert film: 101 will continue with a party with local DJs at the Sol Bar.
General partner of the festival Beat Weekend is Tinkoff Bank. Co-organizers of the festival in Kazan are the TatarKino GBUK and Smena CSK.