BOOM FOR REAL: ART + MUSIC films
BOOM FOR REAL: a term used by Jean-Michel Basquiat, meaning; he would take all the things in his world that inspire him, big or small, interpret them through his own vision and make them explode onto the canvas equally for us to look at and interpret.
We’ve hand-selected our favourite art and music documentaries— from pioneering women in electronic music and abstract art, to enfant terrible’s of the 80s New York art-scene and 70s London punk-scene— browse through our selection of groundbreaking artists on the celluloid screen.
Sisters With Transistors
DIR. Lisa Rovner
SISTERS WITH TRANSISTORS is the remarkable untold story of electronic music’s female pioneers, composers who embraced machines and their liberating technologies to utterly transform how we produce and listen to music today.
The film maps a new history of electronic music through the visionary women whose radical experimentations with machines redefined the boundaries of music.
Narrated by Laurie Anderson.
Boom for real: Jean-Michel Basquiat
Dir. Sara Driver
BOOM FOR REAL is Sara Driver’s exploration of the pre-fame years of the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, offering a window into his life and the City of New York, 1978-81,
illustrating how the city, the times and the people around him informed the artist he became and shaped his vision.
“The young Jean-Michel Basquiat as a brilliant enigma” The Guardian
RYUICHI SAKAMOTO: OPUS
Dir. NEO SORA
OPUS is celebration of an artist’s life in the purest sense; it is the definitive swan song of the beloved maestro, curated and presented by himself and filmed by his son.
20 pieces, 5 decades, 1 performance, this film features award-winning music from Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence and The Last Emperor, amongst other seminal scores and piano compositions, in his last performance.
On March 28th, 2023, legendary composer Ryuichi Sakamoto died after his struggle against cancer. Shortly before then, he mustered all his energy to leave the world a concert film, featuring just him and his piano.
“Conjures emotions we don’t have names for.” IndieWire
Keyboard Fantasies
DIR. posy dixon
KEYBOARD FANTASIES is a BAFTA-nominated documentary that tells the time-travelling tale of mystical musician and vocalist Beverly-Glenn Copeland.
As the present finally catches up with him and he embarks on his first international tour at the age of 74, the film captures five decades of relentless musical output and shifting manifestations of gender and sexual identity, set against a backdrop of profound social change. It film celebrates the unpredictable rhythms of life.
Beyond the visible: Hilma af klint
Dir. hALINA dyrschka
Hilma af Klint was an abstract artist before the term existed, a visionary, trailblazing figure who, inspired by spiritualism, modern science, and the riches of the natural world around her, began in 1906 to reel out a series of huge, colourful, sensual, strange works without precedent in painting. Her work inspired some most celebrated contemporary artists like Josef Albers, Paul Klee, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, Mondrian, Kandinsky…
Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché
Dir. Celeste Bell + Paul Sng
Poly Styrene was the first woman of colour in the UK to front a successful rock band.
She introduced the world to a new sound of rebellion, using her unconventional voice to sing about identity, consumerism, postmodernism, and everything she saw unfolding in late 1970s Britain, with a rare prescience.
Poly’s letters are read out by Ruth Negga.
A-Ha: The Movie
Dir. Thomas Robsahm
a-ha’s hit Take On Me is still one of the most played songs of the last millennium.
This documentary follows the band over a period of four years, sharing the full story of how three young men followed their impossible dream of making it big. When Take On Me reached number 1 on Billboard in the US in 1985 that dream came true.
The film closely portrays the challenging creative and personal dynamics of a group of three strong individuals.
An Accidental Studio
Dir. Kim Legatt, Bill Jones, Ben Timlett
AN ACCIDENTAL STUDIO charts the early years of HandMade Films as seen through the eyes of the filmmakers, key personnel and the man who started it all - former Beatle George Harrison.
With unreleased archive interviews and footage with Harrison, exclusive interviews with Sir Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam, Richard E. Grant, Neil Jordan, and unseen interviews with Bob Hoskins, this documentary explores HandMade’s baptism by fire, the risks it took in producing uniquely crafted intelligent films and the stories that grew up around it.
Show Me The Picture: JIm Marshall
Dir. Alfred George Bailey
An outsider with attitude, SHOW ME THE PICTURE: The Story of Jim Marshall chronicles the infamous photographer’s life behind and outside the camera.
A child of immigrants and a life battling inner demons, Jim fought his way to become one of the most trusted mavericks behind a lens throughout 60’s history.
A passion for music led him to capture some of the most iconic figures in music history from Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, to the infamous image of Jimi Hendrix burning his guitar.
Be Natural: Alice Buy-Blaché
dir. Pamela B.Green
When Alice Guy-Blaché completed her first film in 1896 Paris, she was not only the first female filmmaker, but one of the first directors ever to make a narrative film. In Be Natural, Pamela B. Green acts as a detective, revealing the real story of Guy-Blaché and highlighting her pioneering contributions to the birth of cinema and her acclaim as a creative force and entrepreneur in the earliest years of movie-making.
Carmine Street Guitars
dir. Ron Mann
At the heart of Greenwich Village, New York, amidst the newly developed luxury restaurants and boutique clothing stores, sits Carmine Street Guitars; a sacred destination for the world’s most notorious guitar players and musicians. In the humble woodworks of Carmine Street Guitars, owner Rick Kelly and his young apprentice Cindy Hulej, build custom handcrafted guitars out of reclaimed wood from old hotels, bars, churches and other local buildings. At the core of their physical craft lies New York’s vibrant cultural history— embraced by the likes of Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Patti Smith and Jim Jarmusch since the store’s inception in 1970 bohemia New York.
White Riot
Dir. Rubika Shah
Rubika Shah’s award-winning and energising film charts a vital national protest movement. Rock Against Racism (RAR) was formed in 1976, prompted by ‘music’s biggest colonialist’ Eric Clapton and his support of racist MP Enoch Powell.
White Riot blends fresh interviews with queasy archive footage to recreate a hostile environment of anti-immigrant hysteria and National Front marches. As neo-Nazis recruited the nation’s youth, RAR’s multicultural punk and reggae gigs provided rallying points for resistance. As co-founder Red Saunders explains: ‘We peeled away the Union Jack to reveal the swastika’.
SHOOTING THE MAFIA
Dir. Kim Longinotto
In the streets of Sicily, beautiful, gutsy Letizia Battaglia pointed her camera straight into the heart of the Mafia that surrounded her and began to shoot. The striking, life-threatening photos she took documenting the rule of the Cosa Nostra define her career.
SHOOTING THE MAFIA weaves together Battaglia’s striking black-and-white photographs, rare archival footage, classic Italian films, and the now 84-year-old’s own memories, to paint a portrait of a remarkable woman whose whose bravery and defiance helped expose the Mafia’s brutal crimes.
TISH
DIR. PAUL SNG
TISH is the story of Tish Murtha, a working-class photographer who captured the impact of Thatcherism on the north of England but was unable to escape the poverty and inequality she exposed.
Through her camera, she felt she had an obligation to the people and problems within her local environment to highlight and challenge the social disadvantages that she herself had suffered.
Told through the eyes of her daughter Ella, the film is a journey of exploration of her mother and as custodian of the archive.
“Gripping portrait of a passionate photographer of austerity Britain” The Guardian
STEPHEN
DIR. MELANIE MANCHOT
STEPHEN is auditioning to play himself in an inventive, cinematic and moving exploration of addiction and mental health.
Visual artist Melanie Manchot works with a recovery group in Liverpool, who take up roles in a semi-fictional film-within-a-film that explores addiction and mental health from multiple perspectives. It is centred around Stephen, a character recovering from gambling and alcohol addictions.
References to the first police crime reconstruction, filmed in Liverpool in 1901, are a reminder that addiction has long existed within the fabric of our culture. It’s a tough process and emotionally charged scenes reveal inner truths, which gain additional power when the people playing the roles are, in some sense, playing themselves.
THE NOWHERE INN
DIR. Bill benz
THE NOWHERE INN follows real-life friends Annie Clark (aka Grammy award-winning recording artist St. Vincent) and Carrie Brownstein (Portlandia, Sleater-Kinney, the best-selling Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl) in this metafictional account of two creative forces banding together to make a documentary about St. Vincent's music, touring life, and on-stage persona. Cameo from Dakota Johnson.
They quickly discover unpredictable forces lurking within subject and filmmaker that threaten to derail the friendship, the project, and the duo's creative lives. It’s a densely woven, laugh-out-loud funny and increasingly fractured commentary on reality, identity, and authenticity. A story of two close friends who attempt to wrestle the truth out of a complex subject before the hall of mirrors that is their artistic lives devours them completely.