In-Edit Beefeater 2010
Some music fans get slightly over-excited about In-Edit. Hidden away at the back of dingy gigs for most of the year, the sheer thrill of sitting in a cinema with like-minded folk and watching film after film about their favourite thing is all a bit too much.
Like an awkward teenager who becomes a rock star, In-Edit has become popular in recent years after humble beginnings. Now in its eighth year and with more screenings than ever before, this music documentary shindig has made it officially cool to be a music geek.
This year the festival will be tipping its hat to D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hededus, a film-making team responsible for the highly influential Don’t Look Back (which documents Bob Dylan going electric in 1965), Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (pictured) and Monterey Pop. Not content with defining music documentaries in the Sixties, the pair went on to focus their lens at Depeche Mode, a band met with muted interest in their native country but wild hysteria everywhere else. Depeche Mode 101 is the result.
As ever, you can genre hop to your heart’s content with a satisfying international mix of films both old and new. From the UK, look for High on Hope, Piers Sanderson’s film about the acid house scene in the early Nineties or the Clint Eastwood-produced Johnny Mercer: The Dream’s On Me which celebrates the man who wrote songs for the likes of Fred Astaire and Judy Garland. Meanwhile Soul Train: The Hippest Trip in America is a veritable feast of flares and afros while Barcelona Era Una Fiesta shows the Catalans wearing flowers in their hair and spitting their discontent in underground punk venues.
New for this year is a Halloween film marathon showing historic concert footage from British bands and a designated drinking den for post-film chin-stroking. Also, to save on shoe leather, the cinema screens and box office are much closer together this year so there’s no running to catch the start of the animated life and times of Jóse González or that kooky looking documentary about The Magnetic Fields.