list http://www.spout.com/ Recent community activity around Throw Down Your Heart on Spout Copyright 2005-9 Spout, LLC Spout RSS http://www.spout.com/images/SpoutLogoRSS.jpg http://www.spout.com/ 136 30 http://www.spout.com/films/Throw_Down_Your_Heart/365109/default.aspx Title: Throw Down Your Heart
Year: 2008
Director: Sascha Paladino
Plot: Bela Fleck is one of the world's most acclaimed banjo players and a musician who has sought to expand the boundaries of his instrument, having won awards for classical recordings and his many albums with the innovative jazz group Bela Fleck and the Flecktones as well as the bluegrass music most commonly associated with the banjo. The banjo has its origins in Africa, and Fleck traveled to the continent to study the instrument's history and collaborate with native musicians. Filmmaker Sascha Paladino joined Fleck for his journey, and Throw Down Your Heart is a documentary which follows the banjo virtuoso as he travels through Gambia, Mali, Tanzania and Uganda, meeting with historians and musicologists and making music with artists from all walks of life, ranging from world music start like Bassekou Kouyate and Oumou Sangare to ordinary people who share the love and joy of making music. Throw Down Your Heart was an official entry at the 2008 South by Southwest Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Times Tagged: 8
Number of Lists: 2
Number of blog posts: 8
]]>Thu, 23 Apr 2009 13:02:31 GMTThrow Down Your Heart2008Sascha PaladinoBela Fleck is one of the world's most acclaimed banjo players and a musician who has sought to expand the boundaries of his instrument, having won awards for classical recordings and his many albums with the innovative jazz group Bela Fleck and the Flecktones as well as the bluegrass music most commonly associated with the banjo. The banjo has its origins in Africa, and Fleck traveled to the continent to study the instrument's history and collaborate with native musicians. Filmmaker Sascha Paladino joined Fleck for his journey, and Throw Down Your Heart is a documentary which follows the banjo virtuoso as he travels through Gambia, Mali, Tanzania and Uganda, meeting with historians and musicologists and making music with artists from all walks of life, ranging from world music start like Bassekou Kouyate and Oumou Sangare to ordinary people who share the love and joy of making music. Throw Down Your Heart was an official entry at the 2008 South by Southwest Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide8Taggedy Taggged (6-10)28http://www.spout.com/ProductImages/s365109.jpghttp://www.spout.com/films/Throw_Down_Your_Heart/365109/default.aspxFilm http://www.spout.com/blogs/karina/archive/2009/4/23/41708.aspx Post By: Karina
Post To: Karina on SpoutBlog
Post Date: 4/23/2009 9:02:31 AM
Body: The neatest formal trick in Throw Down Your Heart, Sascha Paladino’s somewhat overlong but surprisingly moving document of his brother Bela Fleck’s journey to Africa to sort out the roots of the banjo and record an album with native musicians, is the employment of selective translation. Fleck, a celebrity in his bluegrass/jazz Americana niche, is a wide-eyed total outsider in Uganda and Tanzania, where even those who speak English have thick enough accents that their words need to be subtitled. But Paladino only translates African song lyrics and conversations between locals when the content within is essential to understanding a scene. This forces us to really contemplate the imagery and the sound of the music––elements that are so universal they need no translation––to pick up most emotional cues, and for the most part, it works beautifully. For a film about the power of music to shatter cultural and historic barriers and unite people based on pure feeling, I can’t imagine a tighter welding of form and content. It’s in the first half of the film that Fleck’s enthusiasm for––and obvious feeling of humility in the presence of––the musicians he encounters in Africa seems most infectious. In the first tenuous collaborations, once Fleck and the local musicians figure out how to transverse what they don’t understand about one another, their music-making sessions seem to boil up to a level of intense emotion very quickly. In Uganda, Fleck’s local partner is driven to reluctant, uncontrollable tears by a song about his father; towards the end of his stay in Tanzania, after collaborating with the blind, enigmatic finger piano genius Anania, Fleck admits, “I don’t think I’ve ever felt this way.” It’s a beautiful illustration of powerlessness in the face of art, as this should-be-jaded professional musician surrenders to music’s power to dredge up feelings against our will. This might be a subjective observation –– I imagine your enjoyment of the film will depend somewhat on your level of Fleck fandom, and admittedly, for me a little banjo goes a long way — but as Fleck and his crew travel to the west coast of the continent, the emotional power of what’s on screen seems to dissipate. On the Eastern coast, the implicit issues of culture clash and colonialism are more present, and this adds a certain charge to Fleck’s musical collaborations. The title Throw Down Your Heart alludes to the film’s primary text about the emotional power of music, but it’s also a reference to the film’s barely spoken but very present subtext. “Throw down your heart” is the English translation of the name of a town in Tanzania which Fleck visits, a former slave trading port. We’re told the place earned it’s name because future slaves knew their fates when they saw the sea––this was the place where they were forced to give up their lives and loved ones, and throw down their hearts in surrender to the coming ordeal. And we’re told that banjos were taken on the ships, with music providing the only spirit-toking solace of the long journey to hell. And here is Bela Fleck, a white American banjo player who says his stated goal with this project is to divorce the banjo from its equation with white Southern hickishness, and expose its African heritage. In order to do that, he has to go to the place where the instrument’s transport across continents and transfer in connotation literally began. Fleck and Paladino never say, “Bela Fleck has an artistic passion and a career because of slavery”––like so much of the music in the film, it doesn’t need literal translation––but in Tanzania, it’s a sad, uncomfortable realization that hangs over the proceedings. Judging by the look on Fleck’s face when he looks out at the sea, it’s quietly breaking his heart. A version of this review appeared last year during the 2008 Sarasota Film Festival. Throw Down Your Heart begins a one week run at the IFC Center in New York tomorrow. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth
]]>Thu, 23 Apr 2009 13:02:31 GMTKarinaKarina on SpoutBlog4/23/2009 9:02:31 AMThe neatest formal trick in Throw Down Your Heart, Sascha Paladino’s somewhat overlong but surprisingly moving document of his brother Bela Fleck’s journey to Africa to sort out the roots of the banjo and record an album with native musicians, is the employment of selective translation. Fleck, a celebrity in his bluegrass/jazz Americana niche, is a wide-eyed total outsider in Uganda and Tanzania, where even those who speak English have thick enough accents that their words need to be subtitled. But Paladino only translates African song lyrics and conversations between locals when the content within is essential to understanding a scene. This forces us to really contemplate the imagery and the sound of the music––elements that are so universal they need no translation––to pick up most emotional cues, and for the most part, it works beautifully. For a film about the power of music to shatter cultural and historic barriers and unite people based on pure feeling, I can’t imagine a tighter welding of form and content. It’s in the first half of the film that Fleck’s enthusiasm for––and obvious feeling of humility in the presence of––the musicians he encounters in Africa seems most infectious. In the first tenuous collaborations, once Fleck and the local musicians figure out how to transverse what they don’t understand about one another, their music-making sessions seem to boil up to a level of intense emotion very quickly. In Uganda, Fleck’s local partner is driven to reluctant, uncontrollable tears by a song about his father; towards the end of his stay in Tanzania, after collaborating with the blind, enigmatic finger piano genius Anania, Fleck admits, “I don’t think I’ve ever felt this way.” It’s a beautiful illustration of powerlessness in the face of art, as this should-be-jaded professional musician surrenders to music’s power to dredge up feelings against our will. This might be a subjective observation –– I imagine your enjoyment of the film will depend somewhat on your level of Fleck fandom, and admittedly, for me a little banjo goes a long way — but as Fleck and his crew travel to the west coast of the continent, the emotional power of what’s on screen seems to dissipate. On the Eastern coast, the implicit issues of culture clash and colonialism are more present, and this adds a certain charge to Fleck’s musical collaborations. The title Throw Down Your Heart alludes to the film’s primary text about the emotional power of music, but it’s also a reference to the film’s barely spoken but very present subtext. “Throw down your heart” is the English translation of the name of a town in Tanzania which Fleck visits, a former slave trading port. We’re told the place earned it’s name because future slaves knew their fates when they saw the sea––this was the place where they were forced to give up their lives and loved ones, and throw down their hearts in surrender to the coming ordeal. And we’re told that banjos were taken on the ships, with music providing the only spirit-toking solace of the long journey to hell. And here is Bela Fleck, a white American banjo player who says his stated goal with this project is to divorce the banjo from its equation with white Southern hickishness, and expose its African heritage. In order to do that, he has to go to the place where the instrument’s transport across continents and transfer in connotation literally began. Fleck and Paladino never say, “Bela Fleck has an artistic passion and a career because of slavery”––like so much of the music in the film, it doesn’t need literal translation––but in Tanzania, it’s a sad, uncomfortable realization that hangs over the proceedings. Judging by the look on Fleck’s face when he looks out at the sea, it’s quietly breaking his heart. A version of this review appeared last year during the 2008 Sarasota Film Festival. Throw Down Your Heart begins a one week run at the IFC Center in New York tomorrow. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2009/4/23/41706.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 4/23/2009 9:02:14 AM
Body: The neatest formal trick in Throw Down Your Heart, Sascha Paladino’s somewhat overlong but surprisingly moving document of his brother Bela Fleck’s journey to Africa to sort out the roots of the banjo and record an album with native musicians, is the employment of selective translation. Fleck, a celebrity in his bluegrass/jazz Americana niche, is a wide-eyed total outsider in Uganda and Tanzania, where even those who speak English have thick enough accents that their words need to be subtitled. But Paladino only translates African song lyrics and conversations between locals when the content within is essential to understanding a scene. This forces us to really contemplate the imagery and the sound of the music––elements that are so universal they need no translation––to pick up most emotional cues, and for the most part, it works beautifully. For a film about the power of music to shatter cultural and historic barriers and unite people based on pure feeling, I can’t imagine a tighter welding of form and content. It’s in the first half of the film that Fleck’s enthusiasm for––and obvious feeling of humility in the presence of––the musicians he encounters in Africa seems most infectious. In the first tenuous collaborations, once Fleck and the local musicians figure out how to transverse what they don’t understand about one another, their music-making sessions seem to boil up to a level of intense emotion very quickly. In Uganda, Fleck’s local partner is driven to reluctant, uncontrollable tears by a song about his father; towards the end of his stay in Tanzania, after collaborating with the blind, enigmatic finger piano genius Anania, Fleck admits, “I don’t think I’ve ever felt this way.” It’s a beautiful illustration of powerlessness in the face of art, as this should-be-jaded professional musician surrenders to music’s power to dredge up feelings against our will. This might be a subjective observation –– I imagine your enjoyment of the film will depend somewhat on your level of Fleck fandom, and admittedly, for me a little banjo goes a long way — but as Fleck and his crew travel to the west coast of the continent, the emotional power of what’s on screen seems to dissipate. On the Eastern coast, the implicit issues of culture clash and colonialism are more present, and this adds a certain charge to Fleck’s musical collaborations. The title Throw Down Your Heart alludes to the film’s primary text about the emotional power of music, but it’s also a reference to the film’s barely spoken but very present subtext. “Throw down your heart” is the English translation of the name of a town in Tanzania which Fleck visits, a former slave trading port. We’re told the place earned it’s name because future slaves knew their fates when they saw the sea––this was the place where they were forced to give up their lives and loved ones, and throw down their hearts in surrender to the coming ordeal. And we’re told that banjos were taken on the ships, with music providing the only spirit-toking solace of the long journey to hell. And here is Bela Fleck, a white American banjo player who says his stated goal with this project is to divorce the banjo from its equation with white Southern hickishness, and expose its African heritage. In order to do that, he has to go to the place where the instrument’s transport across continents and transfer in connotation literally began. Fleck and Paladino never say, “Bela Fleck has an artistic passion and a career because of slavery”––like so much of the music in the film, it doesn’t need literal translation––but in Tanzania, it’s a sad, uncomfortable realization that hangs over the proceedings. Judging by the look on Fleck’s face when he looks out at the sea, it’s quietly breaking his heart. A version of this review appeared last year during the 2008 Sarasota Film Festival. Throw Down Your Heart begins a one week run at the IFC Center in New York tomorrow. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Thu, 23 Apr 2009 13:02:14 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com4/23/2009 9:02:14 AMThe neatest formal trick in Throw Down Your Heart, Sascha Paladino’s somewhat overlong but surprisingly moving document of his brother Bela Fleck’s journey to Africa to sort out the roots of the banjo and record an album with native musicians, is the employment of selective translation. Fleck, a celebrity in his bluegrass/jazz Americana niche, is a wide-eyed total outsider in Uganda and Tanzania, where even those who speak English have thick enough accents that their words need to be subtitled. But Paladino only translates African song lyrics and conversations between locals when the content within is essential to understanding a scene. This forces us to really contemplate the imagery and the sound of the music––elements that are so universal they need no translation––to pick up most emotional cues, and for the most part, it works beautifully. For a film about the power of music to shatter cultural and historic barriers and unite people based on pure feeling, I can’t imagine a tighter welding of form and content. It’s in the first half of the film that Fleck’s enthusiasm for––and obvious feeling of humility in the presence of––the musicians he encounters in Africa seems most infectious. In the first tenuous collaborations, once Fleck and the local musicians figure out how to transverse what they don’t understand about one another, their music-making sessions seem to boil up to a level of intense emotion very quickly. In Uganda, Fleck’s local partner is driven to reluctant, uncontrollable tears by a song about his father; towards the end of his stay in Tanzania, after collaborating with the blind, enigmatic finger piano genius Anania, Fleck admits, “I don’t think I’ve ever felt this way.” It’s a beautiful illustration of powerlessness in the face of art, as this should-be-jaded professional musician surrenders to music’s power to dredge up feelings against our will. This might be a subjective observation –– I imagine your enjoyment of the film will depend somewhat on your level of Fleck fandom, and admittedly, for me a little banjo goes a long way — but as Fleck and his crew travel to the west coast of the continent, the emotional power of what’s on screen seems to dissipate. On the Eastern coast, the implicit issues of culture clash and colonialism are more present, and this adds a certain charge to Fleck’s musical collaborations. The title Throw Down Your Heart alludes to the film’s primary text about the emotional power of music, but it’s also a reference to the film’s barely spoken but very present subtext. “Throw down your heart” is the English translation of the name of a town in Tanzania which Fleck visits, a former slave trading port. We’re told the place earned it’s name because future slaves knew their fates when they saw the sea––this was the place where they were forced to give up their lives and loved ones, and throw down their hearts in surrender to the coming ordeal. And we’re told that banjos were taken on the ships, with music providing the only spirit-toking solace of the long journey to hell. And here is Bela Fleck, a white American banjo player who says his stated goal with this project is to divorce the banjo from its equation with white Southern hickishness, and expose its African heritage. In order to do that, he has to go to the place where the instrument’s transport across continents and transfer in connotation literally began. Fleck and Paladino never say, “Bela Fleck has an artistic passion and a career because of slavery”––like so much of the music in the film, it doesn’t need literal translation––but in Tanzania, it’s a sad, uncomfortable realization that hangs over the proceedings. Judging by the look on Fleck’s face when he looks out at the sea, it’s quietly breaking his heart. A version of this review appeared last year during the 2008 Sarasota Film Festival. Throw Down Your Heart begins a one week run at the IFC Center in New York tomorrow. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/blogs/karina/archive/2008/6/25/31697.aspx Post By: Karina
Post To: Karina on SpoutBlog
Post Date: 6/25/2008 5:01:05 PM
Body: I grew up in Los Angeles and have fractured but fierce memories of seeing movies in Westwood, the theater-packed micro-city surrounding UCLA, in which the Los Angeles Film Festival is now based. I think I saw Jurassic Park four times at the Avco. I know I saw my first Lubitsch movie (Design for Living) at UCLA. Yesterday I was standing in line at Rite Aid and had some kind of out-of-body flashback experience of getting ice cream at the same Rite Aid after my mother took me to a matinee of Flight of the Navigator. I’m sure people go to film festivals in their hometowns all the time and don’t think it’s weird at all, but I get painfully nostalgic. I, like, went to school and stuff, but hanging out in these theaters for entire summers is how I fell in love with movies. Funny, then, that I’ve been here for almost two full days and I haven’t yet been able to see a single film. Part of this is a scheduling issue––I got in too late on Monday to make it to a screening, and I had already seen many of the films that played yesterday, including Medicine for Melancholy and The Pleasure of Being Robbed. I did actually try to make a screening of Largo, the documentary about the famed Fairfax club, but I, um, went to the wrong theater by mistake and missed it. And then, there were parties to go to. More on that, with photo evidence, after the jump. The evening began with a cocktail party hosted by Cinemocracy, the Denver Film Society’s initiative to produce a film festival at the Democratic National Convention. They were handing out buttons, which was useful because earlier in the day I had spilled coffee on my dress and I had a spot that I needed to cover up. Here are (l-r) Mike Jones from Variety, Cinetic’s Matt Dentler, Throw Down Your Heart director Sascha Paladino, and Eugene Hernandez from indieWIRE. From there, it was on to the Sunset Marquis, for a party thrown by IFC to celebrate their films at the festival. I didn’t get pictures of either of these things, but highlights included the flower that Josh Safdie was wearing behind his ear, and a “group spoon”, involving about ten drunk filmmakers lying on the floor in loose embrace. Gregg Araki, pictured above with Strand’s Marcus Hu, was not one of them. Barry Jenkins, director of Medicine for Melancholy, did spoon. He’s pictured above right, next to Quiet City producer Brendan McFadden, IFC’s Ryan Warner, and muti-hyphenate Michael Lerman. I have a lot of pictures of Michael Lerman, who wrote a fantastic writeup of the first half of the fest for indieWIRE. Above, he’s pretending to be a wine snob with Amy Seimetz, a producer on Melancholy who is also directing her own feature and appearing in the next film by Joe Swanberg. Below, Lerman and Yeast star Amy Judd. Then we moved on to the Target Red Room, the Festival’s corporate sponsored party space, where Serge Bozon was DJing. Serge is here with his feature La France, which was described to me as a “World War I pop musical. Obviously, that made me swoon. The filmmaker is a vinyl collector who spent $900 on a handful of 45s hours before his set. In between each song, he’d pop on the mic in heavily-accented English (see above) to introduce the next track with what we eventually figured out were misnomers. “Here we go, with another classic track from Minneapolis!” was one of his favorites, which I think, at one point, he applied to The Ramones; for his finale, announced a “slow song” which turned out to be a ten-minute epic piece of proto punk that was essentially too fast to dance to. But I tried. Variety critic Robert Koehler captures the magic. Sales agent Nguyen “Wyn” Tran poses with LAFF programmer Doug Jones. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth
]]>Wed, 25 Jun 2008 21:01:05 GMTKarinaKarina on SpoutBlog6/25/2008 5:01:05 PMI grew up in Los Angeles and have fractured but fierce memories of seeing movies in Westwood, the theater-packed micro-city surrounding UCLA, in which the Los Angeles Film Festival is now based. I think I saw Jurassic Park four times at the Avco. I know I saw my first Lubitsch movie (Design for Living) at UCLA. Yesterday I was standing in line at Rite Aid and had some kind of out-of-body flashback experience of getting ice cream at the same Rite Aid after my mother took me to a matinee of Flight of the Navigator. I’m sure people go to film festivals in their hometowns all the time and don’t think it’s weird at all, but I get painfully nostalgic. I, like, went to school and stuff, but hanging out in these theaters for entire summers is how I fell in love with movies. Funny, then, that I’ve been here for almost two full days and I haven’t yet been able to see a single film. Part of this is a scheduling issue––I got in too late on Monday to make it to a screening, and I had already seen many of the films that played yesterday, including Medicine for Melancholy and The Pleasure of Being Robbed. I did actually try to make a screening of Largo, the documentary about the famed Fairfax club, but I, um, went to the wrong theater by mistake and missed it. And then, there were parties to go to. More on that, with photo evidence, after the jump. The evening began with a cocktail party hosted by Cinemocracy, the Denver Film Society’s initiative to produce a film festival at the Democratic National Convention. They were handing out buttons, which was useful because earlier in the day I had spilled coffee on my dress and I had a spot that I needed to cover up. Here are (l-r) Mike Jones from Variety, Cinetic’s Matt Dentler, Throw Down Your Heart director Sascha Paladino, and Eugene Hernandez from indieWIRE. From there, it was on to the Sunset Marquis, for a party thrown by IFC to celebrate their films at the festival. I didn’t get pictures of either of these things, but highlights included the flower that Josh Safdie was wearing behind his ear, and a “group spoon”, involving about ten drunk filmmakers lying on the floor in loose embrace. Gregg Araki, pictured above with Strand’s Marcus Hu, was not one of them. Barry Jenkins, director of Medicine for Melancholy, did spoon. He’s pictured above right, next to Quiet City producer Brendan McFadden, IFC’s Ryan Warner, and muti-hyphenate Michael Lerman. I have a lot of pictures of Michael Lerman, who wrote a fantastic writeup of the first half of the fest for indieWIRE. Above, he’s pretending to be a wine snob with Amy Seimetz, a producer on Melancholy who is also directing her own feature and appearing in the next film by Joe Swanberg. Below, Lerman and Yeast star Amy Judd. Then we moved on to the Target Red Room, the Festival’s corporate sponsored party space, where Serge Bozon was DJing. Serge is here with his feature La France, which was described to me as a “World War I pop musical. Obviously, that made me swoon. The filmmaker is a vinyl collector who spent $900 on a handful of 45s hours before his set. In between each song, he’d pop on the mic in heavily-accented English (see above) to introduce the next track with what we eventually figured out were misnomers. “Here we go, with another classic track from Minneapolis!” was one of his favorites, which I think, at one point, he applied to The Ramones; for his finale, announced a “slow song” which turned out to be a ten-minute epic piece of proto punk that was essentially too fast to dance to. But I tried. Variety critic Robert Koehler captures the magic. Sales agent Nguyen “Wyn” Tran poses with LAFF programmer Doug Jones. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2008/6/25/31696.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 6/25/2008 5:00:52 PM
Body: I grew up in Los Angeles and have fractured but fierce memories of seeing movies in Westwood, the theater-packed micro-city surrounding UCLA, in which the Los Angeles Film Festival is now based. I think I saw Jurassic Park four times at the Avco. I know I saw my first Lubitsch movie (Design for Living) at UCLA. Yesterday I was standing in line at Rite Aid and had some kind of out-of-body flashback experience of getting ice cream at the same Rite Aid after my mother took me to a matinee of Flight of the Navigator. I’m sure people go to film festivals in their hometowns all the time and don’t think it’s weird at all, but I get painfully nostalgic. I, like, went to school and stuff, but hanging out in these theaters for entire summers is how I fell in love with movies. Funny, then, that I’ve been here for almost two full days and I haven’t yet been able to see a single film. Part of this is a scheduling issue––I got in too late on Monday to make it to a screening, and I had already seen many of the films that played yesterday, including Medicine for Melancholy and The Pleasure of Being Robbed. I did actually try to make a screening of Largo, the documentary about the famed Fairfax club, but I, um, went to the wrong theater by mistake and missed it. And then, there were parties to go to. More on that, with photo evidence, after the jump. The evening began with a cocktail party hosted by Cinemocracy, the Denver Film Society’s initiative to produce a film festival at the Democratic National Convention. They were handing out buttons, which was useful because earlier in the day I had spilled coffee on my dress and I had a spot that I needed to cover up. Here are (l-r) Mike Jones from Variety, Cinetic’s Matt Dentler, Throw Down Your Heart director Sascha Paladino, and Eugene Hernandez from indieWIRE. From there, it was on to the Sunset Marquis, for a party thrown by IFC to celebrate their films at the festival. I didn’t get pictures of either of these things, but highlights included the flower that Josh Safdie was wearing behind his ear, and a “group spoon”, involving about ten drunk filmmakers lying on the floor in loose embrace. Gregg Araki, pictured above with Strand’s Marcus Hu, was not one of them. Barry Jenkins, director of Medicine for Melancholy, did spoon. He’s pictured above right, next to Quiet City producer Brendan McFadden, IFC’s Ryan Warner, and muti-hyphenate Michael Lerman. I have a lot of pictures of Michael Lerman, who wrote a fantastic writeup of the first half of the fest for indieWIRE. Above, he’s pretending to be a wine snob with Amy Seimetz, a producer on Melancholy who is also directing her own feature and appearing in the next film by Joe Swanberg. Below, Lerman and Yeast star Amy Judd. Then we moved on to the Target Red Room, the Festival’s corporate sponsored party space, where Serge Bozon was DJing. Serge is here with his feature La France, which was described to me as a “World War I pop musical. Obviously, that made me swoon. The filmmaker is a vinyl collector who spent $900 on a handful of 45s hours before his set. In between each song, he’d pop on the mic in heavily-accented English (see above) to introduce the next track with what we eventually figured out were misnomers. “Here we go, with another classic track from Minneapolis!” was one of his favorites, which I think, at one point, he applied to The Ramones; for his finale, announced a “slow song” which turned out to be a ten-minute epic piece of proto punk that was essentially too fast to dance to. But I tried. Variety critic Robert Koehler captures the magic. Sales agent Nguyen “Wyn” Tran poses with LAFF programmer Doug Jones. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Wed, 25 Jun 2008 21:00:52 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com6/25/2008 5:00:52 PMI grew up in Los Angeles and have fractured but fierce memories of seeing movies in Westwood, the theater-packed micro-city surrounding UCLA, in which the Los Angeles Film Festival is now based. I think I saw Jurassic Park four times at the Avco. I know I saw my first Lubitsch movie (Design for Living) at UCLA. Yesterday I was standing in line at Rite Aid and had some kind of out-of-body flashback experience of getting ice cream at the same Rite Aid after my mother took me to a matinee of Flight of the Navigator. I’m sure people go to film festivals in their hometowns all the time and don’t think it’s weird at all, but I get painfully nostalgic. I, like, went to school and stuff, but hanging out in these theaters for entire summers is how I fell in love with movies. Funny, then, that I’ve been here for almost two full days and I haven’t yet been able to see a single film. Part of this is a scheduling issue––I got in too late on Monday to make it to a screening, and I had already seen many of the films that played yesterday, including Medicine for Melancholy and The Pleasure of Being Robbed. I did actually try to make a screening of Largo, the documentary about the famed Fairfax club, but I, um, went to the wrong theater by mistake and missed it. And then, there were parties to go to. More on that, with photo evidence, after the jump. The evening began with a cocktail party hosted by Cinemocracy, the Denver Film Society’s initiative to produce a film festival at the Democratic National Convention. They were handing out buttons, which was useful because earlier in the day I had spilled coffee on my dress and I had a spot that I needed to cover up. Here are (l-r) Mike Jones from Variety, Cinetic’s Matt Dentler, Throw Down Your Heart director Sascha Paladino, and Eugene Hernandez from indieWIRE. From there, it was on to the Sunset Marquis, for a party thrown by IFC to celebrate their films at the festival. I didn’t get pictures of either of these things, but highlights included the flower that Josh Safdie was wearing behind his ear, and a “group spoon”, involving about ten drunk filmmakers lying on the floor in loose embrace. Gregg Araki, pictured above with Strand’s Marcus Hu, was not one of them. Barry Jenkins, director of Medicine for Melancholy, did spoon. He’s pictured above right, next to Quiet City producer Brendan McFadden, IFC’s Ryan Warner, and muti-hyphenate Michael Lerman. I have a lot of pictures of Michael Lerman, who wrote a fantastic writeup of the first half of the fest for indieWIRE. Above, he’s pretending to be a wine snob with Amy Seimetz, a producer on Melancholy who is also directing her own feature and appearing in the next film by Joe Swanberg. Below, Lerman and Yeast star Amy Judd. Then we moved on to the Target Red Room, the Festival’s corporate sponsored party space, where Serge Bozon was DJing. Serge is here with his feature La France, which was described to me as a “World War I pop musical. Obviously, that made me swoon. The filmmaker is a vinyl collector who spent $900 on a handful of 45s hours before his set. In between each song, he’d pop on the mic in heavily-accented English (see above) to introduce the next track with what we eventually figured out were misnomers. “Here we go, with another classic track from Minneapolis!” was one of his favorites, which I think, at one point, he applied to The Ramones; for his finale, announced a “slow song” which turned out to be a ten-minute epic piece of proto punk that was essentially too fast to dance to. But I tried. Variety critic Robert Koehler captures the magic. Sales agent Nguyen “Wyn” Tran poses with LAFF programmer Doug Jones. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/blogs/karina/archive/2008/4/8/27102.aspx Post By: Karina
Post To: Karina on SpoutBlog
Post Date: 4/8/2008 3:01:26 PM
Body: The neatest formal trick in Throw Down Your Heart, Sascha Paladino’s somewhat overlong but surprisingly moving document of his brother Bela Fleck’s journey to Africa to sort out the roots of the banjo and record an album with native musicians, is the employment of selective translation. Fleck, a celebrity in his bluegrass/jazz Americana niche, is a wide-eyed total outsider in Uganda and Tanzania, where even those who speak English have thick enough accents that their words need to be subtitled. But Paladino only translates African song lyrics and conversations between locals when the content within is essential to understanding a scene. This forces us to really contemplate the imagery and the sound of the music––elements that are so universal they need no translation––to pick up most emotional cues, and for the most part, it works beautifully. For a film about the power of music to shatter cultural and historic barriers and unite people based on pure feeling, I can’t imagine a tighter welding of form and content. It’s in the first half of the film that Fleck’s enthusiasm for––and obvious feeling of humility in the presence of––the musicians he encounters in Africa seems most infectious. In the first tenuous collaborations, once Fleck and the local musicians figure out how to transverse what they don’t understand about one another, their music-making sessions seem to boil up to a level of intense emotion very quickly. In Uganda, Fleck’s local partner is driven to reluctant, uncontrollable tears by a song about his father; towards the end of his stay in Tanzania, after collaborating with the blind, enigmatic finger piano genius Anania, Fleck admits, “I don’t think I’ve ever felt this way.” It’s about surrendering to music’s power to dredge up feelings against our will. As Fleck and his crew travel to the west coast of the continent, the emotional power of what’s on screen seems to dissipate. But maybe that’s just me––I imagine your enjoyment of the film will depend somewhat on your level of Fleck fandom, and admittedly, for me a little banjo goes a long way. But it does seem like, on the Eastern coast, the implicit issues of culture clash and colonialism are more present, and this adds a certain charge to Fleck’s musical collaborations. The title Throw Down Your Heart alludes to the film’s primary text about the emotional power of music, but it’s also a reference to the film’s barely spoken but very present subtext. “Throw down your heart” is the English translation of the name of a town in Tanzania which Fleck visits, a former slave trading port. We’re told the place earned it’s name because future slaves knew their fates when they saw the sea––this was the place where they were forced to give up their lives and loved ones, and throw down their hearts in surrender to the coming ordeal. And we’re told that banjos were taken on the ships, with music providing the only spirit-toking solace of the long journey to hell. And here is Bela Fleck, a white American banjo player who says his stated goal with this project is to divorce the banjo from its equation with white Southern hickishness, and expose its African heritage. In order to do that, he has to go to the place where the instrument’s transport across continents and transfer in connotation literally began. Fleck and Paladino never say, “Bela Fleck has an artistic passion and a career because of slavery”––like so much of the music in the film, it doesn’t need literal translation––but in Tanzania, it’s a sad, uncomfortable realization that hangs over the proceedings. Judging by the look on Fleck’s face when he looks out at the sea, it’s quietly breaking his heart. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth
]]>Tue, 08 Apr 2008 19:01:26 GMTKarinaKarina on SpoutBlog4/8/2008 3:01:26 PM The neatest formal trick in Throw Down Your Heart, Sascha Paladino’s somewhat overlong but surprisingly moving document of his brother Bela Fleck’s journey to Africa to sort out the roots of the banjo and record an album with native musicians, is the employment of selective translation. Fleck, a celebrity in his bluegrass/jazz Americana niche, is a wide-eyed total outsider in Uganda and Tanzania, where even those who speak English have thick enough accents that their words need to be subtitled. But Paladino only translates African song lyrics and conversations between locals when the content within is essential to understanding a scene. This forces us to really contemplate the imagery and the sound of the music––elements that are so universal they need no translation––to pick up most emotional cues, and for the most part, it works beautifully. For a film about the power of music to shatter cultural and historic barriers and unite people based on pure feeling, I can’t imagine a tighter welding of form and content. It’s in the first half of the film that Fleck’s enthusiasm for––and obvious feeling of humility in the presence of––the musicians he encounters in Africa seems most infectious. In the first tenuous collaborations, once Fleck and the local musicians figure out how to transverse what they don’t understand about one another, their music-making sessions seem to boil up to a level of intense emotion very quickly. In Uganda, Fleck’s local partner is driven to reluctant, uncontrollable tears by a song about his father; towards the end of his stay in Tanzania, after collaborating with the blind, enigmatic finger piano genius Anania, Fleck admits, “I don’t think I’ve ever felt this way.” It’s about surrendering to music’s power to dredge up feelings against our will. As Fleck and his crew travel to the west coast of the continent, the emotional power of what’s on screen seems to dissipate. But maybe that’s just me––I imagine your enjoyment of the film will depend somewhat on your level of Fleck fandom, and admittedly, for me a little banjo goes a long way. But it does seem like, on the Eastern coast, the implicit issues of culture clash and colonialism are more present, and this adds a certain charge to Fleck’s musical collaborations. The title Throw Down Your Heart alludes to the film’s primary text about the emotional power of music, but it’s also a reference to the film’s barely spoken but very present subtext. “Throw down your heart” is the English translation of the name of a town in Tanzania which Fleck visits, a former slave trading port. We’re told the place earned it’s name because future slaves knew their fates when they saw the sea––this was the place where they were forced to give up their lives and loved ones, and throw down their hearts in surrender to the coming ordeal. And we’re told that banjos were taken on the ships, with music providing the only spirit-toking solace of the long journey to hell. And here is Bela Fleck, a white American banjo player who says his stated goal with this project is to divorce the banjo from its equation with white Southern hickishness, and expose its African heritage. In order to do that, he has to go to the place where the instrument’s transport across continents and transfer in connotation literally began. Fleck and Paladino never say, “Bela Fleck has an artistic passion and a career because of slavery”––like so much of the music in the film, it doesn’t need literal translation––but in Tanzania, it’s a sad, uncomfortable realization that hangs over the proceedings. Judging by the look on Fleck’s face when he looks out at the sea, it’s quietly breaking his heart. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2008/4/8/27101.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 4/8/2008 3:01:15 PM
Body: The neatest formal trick in Throw Down Your Heart, Sascha Paladino’s somewhat overlong but surprisingly moving document of his brother Bela Fleck’s journey to Africa to sort out the roots of the banjo and record an album with native musicians, is the employment of selective translation. Fleck, a celebrity in his bluegrass/jazz Americana niche, is a wide-eyed total outsider in Uganda and Tanzania, where even those who speak English have thick enough accents that their words need to be subtitled. But Paladino only translates African song lyrics and conversations between locals when the content within is essential to understanding a scene. This forces us to really contemplate the imagery and the sound of the music––elements that are so universal they need no translation––to pick up most emotional cues, and for the most part, it works beautifully. For a film about the power of music to shatter cultural and historic barriers and unite people based on pure feeling, I can’t imagine a tighter welding of form and content. It’s in the first half of the film that Fleck’s enthusiasm for––and obvious feeling of humility in the presence of––the musicians he encounters in Africa seems most infectious. In the first tenuous collaborations, once Fleck and the local musicians figure out how to transverse what they don’t understand about one another, their music-making sessions seem to boil up to a level of intense emotion very quickly. In Uganda, Fleck’s local partner is driven to reluctant, uncontrollable tears by a song about his father; towards the end of his stay in Tanzania, after collaborating with the blind, enigmatic finger piano genius Anania, Fleck admits, “I don’t think I’ve ever felt this way.” It’s about surrendering to music’s power to dredge up feelings against our will. As Fleck and his crew travel to the west coast of the continent, the emotional power of what’s on screen seems to dissipate. But maybe that’s just me––I imagine your enjoyment of the film will depend somewhat on your level of Fleck fandom, and admittedly, for me a little banjo goes a long way. But it does seem like, on the Eastern coast, the implicit issues of culture clash and colonialism are more present, and this adds a certain charge to Fleck’s musical collaborations. The title Throw Down Your Heart alludes to the film’s primary text about the emotional power of music, but it’s also a reference to the film’s barely spoken but very present subtext. “Throw down your heart” is the English translation of the name of a town in Tanzania which Fleck visits, a former slave trading port. We’re told the place earned it’s name because future slaves knew their fates when they saw the sea––this was the place where they were forced to give up their lives and loved ones, and throw down their hearts in surrender to the coming ordeal. And we’re told that banjos were taken on the ships, with music providing the only spirit-toking solace of the long journey to hell. And here is Bela Fleck, a white American banjo player who says his stated goal with this project is to divorce the banjo from its equation with white Southern hickishness, and expose its African heritage. In order to do that, he has to go to the place where the instrument’s transport across continents and transfer in connotation literally began. Fleck and Paladino never say, “Bela Fleck has an artistic passion and a career because of slavery”––like so much of the music in the film, it doesn’t need literal translation––but in Tanzania, it’s a sad, uncomfortable realization that hangs over the proceedings. Judging by the look on Fleck’s face when he looks out at the sea, it’s quietly breaking his heart. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Tue, 08 Apr 2008 19:01:15 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com4/8/2008 3:01:15 PM The neatest formal trick in Throw Down Your Heart, Sascha Paladino’s somewhat overlong but surprisingly moving document of his brother Bela Fleck’s journey to Africa to sort out the roots of the banjo and record an album with native musicians, is the employment of selective translation. Fleck, a celebrity in his bluegrass/jazz Americana niche, is a wide-eyed total outsider in Uganda and Tanzania, where even those who speak English have thick enough accents that their words need to be subtitled. But Paladino only translates African song lyrics and conversations between locals when the content within is essential to understanding a scene. This forces us to really contemplate the imagery and the sound of the music––elements that are so universal they need no translation––to pick up most emotional cues, and for the most part, it works beautifully. For a film about the power of music to shatter cultural and historic barriers and unite people based on pure feeling, I can’t imagine a tighter welding of form and content. It’s in the first half of the film that Fleck’s enthusiasm for––and obvious feeling of humility in the presence of––the musicians he encounters in Africa seems most infectious. In the first tenuous collaborations, once Fleck and the local musicians figure out how to transverse what they don’t understand about one another, their music-making sessions seem to boil up to a level of intense emotion very quickly. In Uganda, Fleck’s local partner is driven to reluctant, uncontrollable tears by a song about his father; towards the end of his stay in Tanzania, after collaborating with the blind, enigmatic finger piano genius Anania, Fleck admits, “I don’t think I’ve ever felt this way.” It’s about surrendering to music’s power to dredge up feelings against our will. As Fleck and his crew travel to the west coast of the continent, the emotional power of what’s on screen seems to dissipate. But maybe that’s just me––I imagine your enjoyment of the film will depend somewhat on your level of Fleck fandom, and admittedly, for me a little banjo goes a long way. But it does seem like, on the Eastern coast, the implicit issues of culture clash and colonialism are more present, and this adds a certain charge to Fleck’s musical collaborations. The title Throw Down Your Heart alludes to the film’s primary text about the emotional power of music, but it’s also a reference to the film’s barely spoken but very present subtext. “Throw down your heart” is the English translation of the name of a town in Tanzania which Fleck visits, a former slave trading port. We’re told the place earned it’s name because future slaves knew their fates when they saw the sea––this was the place where they were forced to give up their lives and loved ones, and throw down their hearts in surrender to the coming ordeal. And we’re told that banjos were taken on the ships, with music providing the only spirit-toking solace of the long journey to hell. And here is Bela Fleck, a white American banjo player who says his stated goal with this project is to divorce the banjo from its equation with white Southern hickishness, and expose its African heritage. In order to do that, he has to go to the place where the instrument’s transport across continents and transfer in connotation literally began. Fleck and Paladino never say, “Bela Fleck has an artistic passion and a career because of slavery”––like so much of the music in the film, it doesn’t need literal translation––but in Tanzania, it’s a sad, uncomfortable realization that hangs over the proceedings. Judging by the look on Fleck’s face when he looks out at the sea, it’s quietly breaking his heart. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/blogs/karina/archive/2008/4/8/27095.aspx Post By: Karina
Post To: Karina on SpoutBlog
Post Date: 4/8/2008 12:01:08 PM
Body: Photo via zizzybaloobah @ Flickr. I landed in Sarasota around 2:00 yesterday afternoon, and by the time I was standing in line for my first film an hour later, the sore throat I’d been carrying around for three weeks in New York since returning from SXSW had miraculously disappeared. It would be hard to overstate how magical this place feels in contrast to the cold, gray, post-global warming non-spring of New York City. It’s 80 degrees here and sunny; my hotel’s right on the beach. And I’m working. Feel free to hate me––I would. Speaking of work, I saw two films yesterday, Throw Down Your Heart and Spine Tingler: The William Castle Story, both of which I’ll be writing about shortly. More soon. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth
]]>Tue, 08 Apr 2008 16:01:08 GMTKarinaKarina on SpoutBlog4/8/2008 12:01:08 PM Photo via zizzybaloobah @ Flickr. I landed in Sarasota around 2:00 yesterday afternoon, and by the time I was standing in line for my first film an hour later, the sore throat I’d been carrying around for three weeks in New York since returning from SXSW had miraculously disappeared. It would be hard to overstate how magical this place feels in contrast to the cold, gray, post-global warming non-spring of New York City. It’s 80 degrees here and sunny; my hotel’s right on the beach. And I’m working. Feel free to hate me––I would. Speaking of work, I saw two films yesterday, Throw Down Your Heart and Spine Tingler: The William Castle Story, both of which I’ll be writing about shortly. More soon. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2008/4/8/27093.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 4/8/2008 12:00:50 PM
Body: Photo via zizzybaloobah @ Flickr. I landed in Sarasota around 2:00 yesterday afternoon, and by the time I was standing in line for my first film an hour later, the sore throat I’d been carrying around for three weeks in New York since returning from SXSW had miraculously disappeared. It would be hard to overstate how magical this place feels in contrast to the cold, gray, post-global warming non-spring of New York City. It’s 80 degrees here and sunny; my hotel’s right on the beach. And I’m working. Feel free to hate me––I would. Speaking of work, I saw two films yesterday, Throw Down Your Heart and Spine Tingler: The William Castle Story, both of which I’ll be writing about shortly. More soon. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Tue, 08 Apr 2008 16:00:50 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com4/8/2008 12:00:50 PM Photo via zizzybaloobah @ Flickr. I landed in Sarasota around 2:00 yesterday afternoon, and by the time I was standing in line for my first film an hour later, the sore throat I’d been carrying around for three weeks in New York since returning from SXSW had miraculously disappeared. It would be hard to overstate how magical this place feels in contrast to the cold, gray, post-global warming non-spring of New York City. It’s 80 degrees here and sunny; my hotel’s right on the beach. And I’m working. Feel free to hate me––I would. Speaking of work, I saw two films yesterday, Throw Down Your Heart and Spine Tingler: The William Castle Story, both of which I’ll be writing about shortly. More soon. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/music/MemberTagFilms.aspxmusic
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