Music

Up close and personal with The Band’s legendary, plain-speaking drummer and singer. “A captivating look at a musician hanging onto his art for dear life… The performances included are wonderful.” — Hollywood Reporter

“Poignant and powerful, complex and melancholy… Michael Rapaport’s riveting hip-hop documentary gets uncomfortably close to A Tribe Called Quest, one of the most important and influential groups of the past 25 years.” — AV Club

An amazing treasure trove of previously unseen footage (shot for Swedish TV) provides startling new insights into the American civil rights movement and the ascendancy of Black Power.

Celebrating 40 years of the Film Festival: Ana Torrent, surely one of the great child actors, and Geraldine Chaplin in Carlos Saura’s haunting 1976 classic. “A gripping, profoundly mysterious movie.” — The Guardian

This doco about the West Indies’ late 70s ascension from happy-go-lucky ‘calypso cricketers’ to world beaters is such riotous fun you won’t need to know your googlies from your bouncers to get a big kick out of it.

Simon Ogston’s documentary is an affectionate tribute to both an unknown band worthy of rediscovery and to Christchurch's fertile punk underground that spawned them.

The on, off, and possibly on-again affair of a young African American jazz trumpeter and a Euro-American waitress and aspiring performer, shapes this lovely, loose pastiche of Hollywood musical, French New Wav and urban vérité.

Forthright portrait of the country star who penned the ageless anti-hippie anthem ‘Okie from Muskogee’. With Keith Richards, Dave Alvin, John Carter Cash, Robert Duvall, John Fogerty, George Jones and Merle's wives, past and present.

Actor/director John Turturro takes us on a dramatic musical tour of Naples. “It took an Italian-American to capture with such force the soul and, above all, the suffering and joy of Neapolitan music.” — Il Messaggero

Archive-laden tribute to Chants R&B, a short-lived garage rock combo that thrived in 60s Christchurch.

With intimacy, style and classic performance clips, Susanne Rostock’s documentary surveys the inspiring life of singer, actor and activist Harry Belafonte. “Personal, candid, historic, and impassioned.” — Reverse Shot

This extended version of Geoffrey Cawthorn's Artsville doco provides a much fuller picture of internationally celebrated Wellington composer John Psathas in conversation and at work at home here and in his native Greece.