Dokufest Prizren 2016: Music Documentaires

… As each year passes, it gets a bit trickier to unearth moving image gems with music at the core of their stories. With many feature-length music documentaries becoming a bit stale and formulaic – more and more so every year – our music program tries to reveal a deeper layer of artist-made films, handcrafted, marvelously original glimpses into the less traveled territories of emotional vibration.

Consisting of half a dozen features and a 5-film shorts program, ranging in production year from 1930 up until the present day, each selection – fiction, nonfiction, somewhere in between – explores bespoke landscapes of monumental spaces, collective acts of recuperation through image and sound, and the ephemerality of hidden notes and tones that connote strong ties to things not quite earthbound. But they walk and talk and sing and dance among us just the same…

This fine introduction text is a quote from curator Pamela Cohn, who is in charge of the “Magical Substances: Music on Film” section at the upcoming Dokufest in Prizren (August 5-13). It consists of 6 features and 5 shorts, including two by legendary Les Blank (“A Poem is a Naked Person” (1974) and “Thailand Moments” (1967) AND the 1930 classic by Aleksander Dovzhenko “Earth” (Photo). Here is the catalogue text:

”Avant-garde ”Earth”, a recognized cinema masterpiece, was banned 9 days after release and glorified in Ukraine only after Dovzhenko’s death, bringing forth dozens of controversial interpretations. Full of lyrical pantheism and utopian exaltation, it demonstrated the ambiguity of Ukrainian geopolitical choice in the 1920s. The new soundtrack for Earth was created by Ukrainian ethno-chaos band DakhaBrakha, whose music shifts the emphasis from the film’s ideological connotations to universal ones.”

Below a link to where to get a copy of the film.

Ukraine, 1930, 83 mins.

http://www.dovzhenkocentre.org/eng/product/34

http://dokufest.com/dokufest-xv-announces-full-slate-festival-theme/