Music

A sneak preview of FIORETTA

March 14, 2023 | | Leave a Comment

Sneak Preview of Fioretta – With a Conversation with Randy Schoenberg. Randy Schoenberg (grandson of the famous composer) and his 18-year-old son Joey journey through Europe and the centuries to reclaim 500 years of family history. Along the way, they encounter kings, mystics, and a false messiah, as well as the long-forgotten ordinary people who witnessed Europe’s distant and recent past: the expulsions, the Holocaust, Communism, and, most recently, the refugee crisis precipitated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Randy is renowned for recovering Nazi-looted art, but his greatest achievement might just be reuniting the fractured and scattered shards of his own family.


An Evening with Randy Schoenberg featuring a sneak preview screening of Matthew Mishory’s FIORETTA. In Attendance: Matthew Mishory, Director; Randy Schoenberg, Subject.

Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill

March 13, 2023 | | Leave a Comment

Lost Angel is an intimate portrait of a musical artist, largely, told by Judee herself. Through recorded interviews, concert intros and entries in her personal journal the film provides deep access to the source of her unique musical creativity and to the darker recesses of her struggles with addiction. Additional interviews with friends and contemporaries, including Graham Nash, Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne and David Geffen give a first-hand experience of Judee’s personality, talents and struggles. Ultimately, it is a story of redemption. While not finding a large audience in her lifetime, Judee’s music has been rediscovered inspiring some of top musicians today. Here the film features Adrienne Lenker (Big Thief), Natalie Mering (Weyes Blood) and Shawn Colvin to help bring to life Judee’s core belief that you could “save someone through music.”


In Attendance: Andrew Brown, Co-Director

Karen Carpenter: Starving for Perfection

March 13, 2023 | | Leave a Comment

She was the first in a long line of celebrities to suffer from an eating disorder during an era when the vastly misunderstood phenomenon brought shame and public humiliation. For the first time, we hear Karen Carpenter’s personal struggle in her own voice through never-before released recordings and through the legendary voices of those who knew her and were inspired by her music. As the #1 American musical act of the 1970s, the Carpenters were on top of the world, producing a string of pop masterpieces, including “Close to You,” “We’ve Only Just Begun,” and “Rainy Days and Mondays.” But behind closed doors, Karen’s quest for perfection resulted in low self esteem, a disheartening love life, and a public battle with anorexia nervosa, which ended with her untimely death at the age of only 32. Forty years after her death comes KAREN CARPENTER: STARVING FOR PERFECTION, a captivating, revealing, and unvarnished documentary providing astounding new insight into the singer’s tragically short life and enduring musical legacy.

Billie

December 8, 2021 | Sarasota Film Festival | Leave a Comment

What if the most important story in your life was not your own?

Billie Holiday, one of the greatest voices of all time, was always controversial – a proud black woman who preferred white audiences, an exploited artist and a violent drug addict, a loyal friend and a vindictive lover, a blues singer who didn’t sing the blues, and when she sang the seminal protest song Strange Fruit, an enemy of the state. Her enigmatic accounts of her own life were a mix of half truths and free-form improvisations.

Then, in 1971, journalist Linda Lipnack Kuehl set out to write the definitive biography of Billie. Over 8 years, she tracked down and tape-recorded over 200 hours of interviews with the extraordinary characters that populated the iconic singer’s short, tumultuous life. Raw and brutally honest, incredible testimonies from Charles Mingus, Sarah Vaughan, Tony Bennett, Count Basie, her step-parents, school friends, jail-mates, lawyers, pushers, pimps and even the FBI agents who arrested here – but Linda’s book was never finished and the tapes never heard. Until now.

Anchored around these never-before-heard interviews, BILLIE will play out like a film noir. Melding archive, drama, animation and still images, BILLIE will capture the complexity of a legend through the eyes of the woman whose obsession would lead to her own mysterious, untimely death.

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