Garage Screen and Beat Film Festival, the international festival of documentary films about music and new culture, present a program of screenings to mark Beat’s 15th anniversary.
The program includes new films on contemporary culture and its icons, as well as viewers’ favourites from previous years.
People featured include Alvar Aalto in the biopic Aalto; video art pioneer Nam June Paik, whose ideas are explored in the funny and fascinating film Moon Is the Oldest TV; cult director David Lynch in the essay Lynch/Oz, which looks into his sources of inspiration; dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham in the poetic tribute Cunningham; legendary ballerina Karen Kain in Swan Song, a documentary drama about the world of ballet behind the scenes; and the inventor of selfies and queen of erotic photography Bunny Yeager in Naked Ambition. One unexpected star of the program is Hollywood’s famous casting director Bonnie Timmerman, in Bonnie. In Dario Argento: Panico, which explores the work of the horror maestro, Gaspar Noé and Nicolas Winding Refn discuss Argento’s influence on their work.
Films about music include three works on cult artists: Peter Doherty: Stranger in My Own Skin about the lyricist and frontman of The Libertines; Mutiny in Heaven: The Birthday Party about Nick Cave’s first post-punk band; and Look at Me: XXXTentacion, which tells the tragic story of the SoundCloud rap icon.
The program also includes films on places, events, and phenomena that have shaped contemporary culture: Colette, Mon Amour about the famous, now permanently closed concept store in Paris; COPA 71 about the Women’s World Cup, unprecedented in its scale, yet almost completely erased from the history of sport; and Eternal You about digital immortality and the questions it poses, which will soon concern us all.
