Eight Films at Sundance With Musical Connections

I leave for Park City, Utah in five days. Other than a half-day of skiing and a couple of parties, I’ll mostly be sitting next to other “Press & Industry” inside dark hotel conference rooms converted into movie theaters. Some come for the glamor. We come for the films. Oh, Yarrow Screening Room, next to the Albertson’s parking lot, I’ll be with you soon enough.

But Sundance has also always been a time to experience great music. The ASCAP Cafe and Harry O’s always put on great shows. I—and the world, I think—first heard the duo of Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, who would later become The Swell Season, perform songs from their film, Once. I first saw Cary Brothers, Meiko and so many others on the Hotel Cafe stage at Sundance. I even got to break bread with Suzanne Vega, Alexi Murdoch, Mary Gauthier and Nickel Creek at an ASCAP dinner. This year, music plays a particularly big role in several films, and these are just eight that I’m going to try to see:

1. ODDSAC
ODDSAC is essentially a 54-minute music video from Animal Collective and filmmaker Danny Perez. The songs in the film, the band promises, will never appear anywhere outside the film experience. “It was meant to be an open-ended operation of audio-video synthesis, the passing back and forth of visuals and sound so that each would inform the other and create an organic structure,” said Perez.

2. All My Friends Are Funeral Singers
As if Tim Rutili, the frontman for Califone, wasn’t accomplished enough, he’s the writer/director behind this film about a fortune teller, Zel, who lives with ghosts. They help her help her clients, but begin to get a little restless, and Zel doesn’t want to see them go. Califone, of course, provides the soundtrack.

All My Friends Are Funeral Singers Trailer from Califone on Vimeo.

3. All That I Love (Wszystko co kocham)
Four kids from a small town in Poland form a punk rock band in 1981, just as the Polish Solidarity movement gets going. From director Jacek Borcuch, the film has already won an Audience Award at the Polish Film Festival.

4. Nowhere Boy
Another coming-of-age story, this of a young boy in late 1950s Liverpool named John Lennon. Before he was a Beatle, he was raised sometimes by his mother and sometimes by his aunt. He finds freedom in music when he meets a guy named Paul. You know the rest, but I can’t wait to see the beginning.

5. Blue Valentine
Derek Cianfrance’s film—“A complex portrait of an American marriage” with Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams—features a soundtrack from Grizzly Bear.

6. The Runaways
Joan Jett produced this biopic of her legendary 1970s LA all-girl band The Runaways. Kristen Stewart, Dakota Fanning, Scout Taylor-Compton, Michael Shannon, Alia Shawkat, Tatum O’Neal star in the film by Floria Sigismondi.

7. Night Catches Us
I have no idea how they found the time between playing for Jimmy Fallon, producing their heroes and working on their next album, but hometown boys The Roots wrote the soundtrack for this coming-of-age story set in race-torn Philadelphia in 1978. Tanya Hamilton directs Anthony Mackie, Kerry Washington, Jamie Hector, Wendell Pierce and Jamara Griffin.

8. The Oath
Paste’s first International Issue turned me on to the music of Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov. It serves as the score to this American documentary shot in Yemen about “two men whose fateful encounter in 1996 set them on a course of events that led them to Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden, 9/11, Guantanamo, and the U.S. Supreme Court.”