With 650 bands playing at 50 venues across the city, NXNE is fun, but extremely exhausting. The festival’s film program, featuring 40 music docs, dramas and comedies, can be the perfect antidote to the hectic pace of ifs tight scheduling.
Famed Canadian filmmakers Bruce McDonald and Sook-Yin Lee give us two of the fest’s most anticipated films tomorrow night. McDonald’s latest, This Movie is Broken is a fictional drama set partly at a Broken Social Scene gig while Lee’s Year of the Carnivore follows a girl looking to gain more “experience” in the sack to impress a boy and is soundtracked by Buck 65.
Canadian acts are quite heavily represented this year; late, great Queen West luminary Handsome Ned gets his due in You Left Me Blue: the Handsome Ned Story. Although never considered a musical hotspot, Winnipeg has quietly churned out its share of great bands as evidenced by The Watchmen: All Uncovered, chronicling the Can-rock ’90s stalwarts recent reunion show, and We’re the Weakerthans, We’re From Winnipeg, a tour doc from the band’s most recent Canadian tour. And let’s not forget Circa 1977: The Diodes following the recently reunited Toronto punk rockers’ first year together.
But the Diodes aren’t the only O.G. punks that get their celluloid due. Both Iggy and the Stooges and X, who are both performing this year, get the doc treatment in Search and Destroy: Iggy Pop and the Stooges’ Raw Power and X: The Unheard Music respectively.
Three of the most interesting films featured this year come from English filmmaker and DJ, Don Letts. Carnival!, which chronicles the history and cultural importance of the annual Notting Hill Carnival in London, makes its North American debut tonight.
Letts famously introduced reggae basslines to the punks while a DJ at England’s first punk club and was a close friend of the Clash, making him the perfect person to explore the legacy of the band’s frontman Joe Strummer with Strummerville, which making its Canadian debut. Letts has the camera turned on himself by director Raphael Erichsen in Supersonic Sound: The Rebel Dread, which uses Letts’ musical legacy to mirror the history of U.K. dub, punk and hip-hop.
Finally, for those on the hunt for an early Father’s Day bonding activity, look no further than Stones in Exile, chronicling the sessions that produced the band’s last great album, Exile on Mainstreet.
