Sound Unseen: Idiosyncratic Music Documentaries Were In Full Focus At Twin Cities Film Festival

The world of music documentaries is a complex one.

There are plenty of films covering the biggest artists in the world from Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé to Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, Hulu’s Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band and Martin Scorsese-produced Beatles ’64.

But under the surface, music like alternative music scenes themselves, there’s a phalanx of weird and interesting films about lesser known artists, where the story is often as strange and endearing as the artists. These often become the films that have longevity, from The Decline of Western Civilization to Dig!

This is where the Sound Unseen Film Festival comes in. Held in the Twin Cities across a variety of cinemas in and around Minneapolis, the festival showcases a slew of leftfield films from interesting directors and filmmakers such as Omar & Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird, Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted, Ani DiFranco’s 1-800-On-Her Own, hip hop doc It Was All A Dream, Broken Social Scene’s It’s All Gonna Break, Pretty Ugly: The Story of the Lunachicks, Since Yesterday: The Untold Story Of Scotland’s Girl Bands, This Is A Film About The Black Keys and Teaches of Peaches.

There’s also a few big-ticket films such as opening night film Devo, directed by Chris Smith, and Linda Perry: Let It Die Here from Don Hardy.

Scott Crawford, director of Creem: America’s Only Rock N Roll Magazine, as two films at the festival: a ten-year anniversary cut of Salad Days: A Decade of Punk In Washington, DC and Something Better Change, a film about D.O.A. frontman Joe Keithley’s shocking political victory.

“Sound Unseen is such a phenomenal film festival, one of my favorites, if not my favorite. I love this town and I love this festival,” he says.

The festival is run by a team of volunteers including Festival Director Jim Brunzell and Program Director Rich Gill. Brunzell says, “We just believe in great cinema and great art and we want to bring this to the Twin Cities.”

Minneapolis is a rock n roll town. The city spawned Prince – Paisley Park is just 20miles outside of the center of the city – as well as classic punk rock bands such as The Replacements, Hüsker Dü and Soul Asylum. This was particularly evident when the festival screened 7 Nights In The Entry, a film from local label Twin/Tone Records about many of these bands playing legendary venue First Avenue, for only the second time ever and the first for around 20 years.

Two of the most interesting films screened at the festival were Omar & Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird and Pavements.

The former is the story of Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and Cedric Bixler-Zavala, who founded At The Drive-In and The Mars Volta. Using hundreds of hours of footage shot by Omar throughout their lives from their early days in the hardcore scene in El Paso, Texas to being signed to the Beastie Boys record label and making it big, via struggles with loss, addiction, and Scientology, before making a comeback. The Nicolas Jack Davies-directed film, using a similar method to Apple’s 1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything docuseries, directed by Amy’s Asif Kapadia, where viewers are never taken out of the moment.

Sound Unseen’s Brunzell said that Omar & Cedric was the first film that it confirmed for this year’s festival. “This is a face melter of a movie, there’s some really intense topics and subject matter but the music is incredible, they’re some really incredible individuals,” he said.  

Pavements, meanwhile, is one of the most fascinating music films I’ve seen in a very long time, if ever. Ostensibly about ‘90s indie rockers Pavement, directed by Her Smell’s Alex Ross Perry, it’s as real as it is fake.

The film, which is just over two hours long, is essentially a documentary, a mockumentary, a fake biopic and musical, all combined and sometimes literally on top of each other.

The documentary explores the band’s creation from their first EP Slay Tracks through to becoming slacker heroes signed to Matador Records before breaking up and reuniting on more than one occasion. Then, there’s Range Life, a scripted segment starring Stranger Things’ Joe Keery as frontman Stephen Malkmus as well as Jason Schwartzmann and Tim Heidecker as record label bosses Chris Lombardi and Gerard Cosloy, as well as footage of Slanted! Enchanted! A Pavement Musical, a real musical that premiered in New York and featured the likes of American Idiot’s Michael Esper and Slip’s Zoe Lister-Jones. There’s also a museum piece, which is mostly fake.

Robert Greene, who produced and edited the film, which premiered at this year’s Venice Film Festival, said during a Deadline-moderated Q&A, “We wanted to make the movie feel deeply sincere, deeply interested in the creative process and all these big ideas about this ‘90s notion of what it means to be authentic and not sell out, and all this other stuff. At the same time, it has to make fun of every bit of that.”

He joked that Pavement members were not always keen on the project. “The band wanted nothing to do with this. Just to be very clear, they’ve only begrudgingly now sort of agreed to be part of it because a couple of friends told them it was good. They were like ‘Wait, cool people like this. That’s good’. Now, they like it,” he added.

Elsewhere, there were more traditional films at the festival including Linda Perry: Let It Die, which comes from Utopia and Mercury Studios. It explores the life of the 4 Non Blondes singer, who has written songs for the likes of Dolly Parton and Christina Aguilera. The dark sob-doc is directed by Don Hardy, who met Perry after he made Sean Penn activist film Citizen Penn.

Perry appeared at the festival for a Q&A and a performance, admitting that she has only watched the film one time through “Freddy Krueger” fingers.

“It’s pretty embarrassing for me, honestly, this film, because it’s so raw and hard for me to watch. But when Don showed me for the very first time, I told him, he made a really beautiful film,” she said.

Perry added it was a “cathartic” experience. “My guard is never up, it’s always down. What drove me out of the band is I get hurt easily. I’m very sensitive. I’m very emotional, I’m a fucking cry baby. Everybody is intimidated by me, and they are scared of me for some weird reason. But I’m a pussy. But I’m always open. I want people to have that experience of true honesty. With Don, it was easy to keep [my guard] down with him around because he’s a good person,” she said.

The film covers Perry’s abusive childhood, her strained relationship with her mother, a secret battle with breast cancer and double mastectomy as well as her creative process working with artists such as Brandi Carlisle and Kate Hudson.

She was similarly emotional during the Q&A. “I don’t protect myself enough. But that’s part of my creative and that’s part of my discomfort, like, the sacrifice for me for creative is discomfort. I’m always going to be just uncomfortable. I will. I know that. I don’t know what happiness truly feels like. I know it when I’m with my child, and I know it when I’m playing music, it feels grounded and bright. But other than that, there’s something about discomfort that keeps me moving forward, and that will be my sacrifice for my art, for now. But I’m getting old, so I better figure it out fucking quickly. I’m funny, I’m social, I’m great, I’m talented but there’s a dark hum that runs through me that creates a lot of music,” she added.

There are significantly more music documentaries being made in recent years even if not all of them strike big deals similar to the likes of Apple’s $25M purchase of Billie Eilish: The World’s A Little Blurry. Devo and This Is A Film About The Black Keys, for instance, are still waiting for pacts.

Ilya Chaiken, who directed Pretty Ugly: The Story of the Lunachicks, added there are other challenging issues that music filmmakers face. During a Q&A after her film, alongside Theo Kogan, lead singer of the 90s New York punk rockers, said, “It’s difficult to do music docs because of music rights and who owns the master rights and the publishing rights, and it can get pretty ugly so there’s a lot of artists that we’d loved to see music docs about that would not get made because of issues like that or estates that control them. That’s the unfortunate side of the business.”

Sound Unseen has been expanding its screenings outside of Minneapolis over the last few years including screenings in Rochester, Minnesota and Austin, Texas in December. But the festival will have a fallow year next year. Sound Unseen’s Brunzell said, “After this year, we’re putting the festival on hiatus, we need a break, we all have full time jobs but this is a labor of love, I’ve been involved for 17 years.