DocFilm Music Awards To Be Announced Soon

Ten feature-length music documentary films - among them "Muscle Shoals", "Rap Is War. Viva Cuba Libre" and "Bayou Maharajah" - qualified for the competition DocFilmMusic at the 54th Krakow Film Festival, kicking off May 25th in Krakow. 

DocFilmMusic, the youngest of the four competitions of Krakow Film Festival, takes place for the second time. The music documentary films submitted to the selection should be longer than 30 minutes. The winner of this section will get the Grand Prix award The Golden Heynal and a cash prize amounting to 20 000 zloty.

 "Music film does not have to mean trifling," says Krzysztof Gierat, the director of Krakow Film Festival. Among this year's offers there are films about cultural phenomena and places, films documenting dreams of freedom, there are also poignant portraits of the loneliness of stars. From the cinema loudspeakers will flow very diverse sounds: beginning with flamenco, reggae, rap to jazz, rock and punk.

All 10 films will be shown in Poland for the first time. "Bayou Maharaja" evokes the New Orleans piano virtuoso, nicknamed "the Black Liberace” because of skin colour, homosexual orientation and extravagant behaviour on stage. "My Prairie Home", a Canadian music documentary filled up with moody songs bordering on indie rock and folk, tells the story about traumatic childhood, loss of faith and struggle with her own identity experienced by transsexual artist Rae Spoon. The authors of the film "Muscle Shoals” will take the viewers to the legendary recording studio in Alabama, which marked American rock, soul and R&B with its characteristic sound. The film, featuring a parade of stars such as Aretha Franklin, The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan has already been appreciated by the viewers on the festivals in Sundance, Amsterdam and SXSW. The rapacious "Rap Is War. Viva Cuba Libre" was filmed with a hidden camera and shows the struggle of music underground against the totalitarian system in Cuba, while the moving "Songs of Redemption" will reveal to us the amount of sensitivity of Jamaicans sentenced to long prison sentences.

In Krakow cinemas we will also hear the untamed flamenco ("Triana Pure and Pure"), strong Polish punk from communist Poland ("Za to, że żyjemy, czyli punk z Wrocka"), the highest quality Bulgarian jazz ("Rainy Day") and Brazilian rhythms in the portrait of a virtuoso accordion player ("Dominguinhos"). 

An important event will certainly be "The New Warsaw" by Bartosz Konopka, nominated for the Academy Award for "Rabbit a la Berlin". The film records a project by Polish renowned actress Stanisława Celińska and Royal String Quartet. New arrangements of popular songs about Warsaw are interwoven with a story about the actress, whose fate was united to the history of the capital city in a special way.

Apart from the DocFilmMusic competition, music documentaries will also be included in the non-competing section "Sound of Music" shown in the open air cinema Kino Pod Wawelem.  Like last year, the music journalist Piotr Metz will watch over the programme of this section.

More about films in the competition soon at: www.krakowfilmfestival.pl