Music at the Movies With Sound Unseen

It's been a glum year for music festivals, as the pandemic lockdown closed venues and silenced speakers, and that's meant sad times in Austin's music scene. Now Minneapolis' Sound Unseen Film + Music Festival is bringing the ruckus to ATX as it expands this year's virtual event, dedicated to films about musicians and cinema about song, to viewers in the Lone Star State.

Since its inception in 1999, the Minnesota-based hybrid movie/music fest has grown to multiple venues across the Twin Cities over five days. Like many festivals faced with the coronavirus shutdown, the team decided to take Sound Unseen online this year: Then around mid-July, festival director Jim Brunzell said, "I thought about doing it in Texas as well Minneapolis."

For Austin audiences, Brunzell is best known as the artistic director of aGLIFF, the All Genders, Lifestyles, and Identities Film Festival. But in Minneapolis he's better known for running Sound Unseen for the last eight years, and he stayed on board even after moving to Austin in 2014. Brunzell called it "an institution in the Twin Cities," and the fact that they can organize it in the Minnesota winter puts the hardships of standing in a SXSW line in spring into perspective. "You can deal with ice storms, snow storms, below zero temperatures, but we still get a lot of people that attend."

This year, the virtual format means they can stream films geolocked to Texas and Minnesota, while the special events – such as a reunion panel for cult classic Pump Up the Volume – will be available globally. However, that doesn't change the aim of the festival. Program director Rich Gill explained, "We always just try to find the best music movies out there, regardless of genre, that we think people would enjoy." As a music journalist, DJ, tour manager, and theatre manager, the excitement of the festival comes from not just exposing audiences to new films, but also to new musicians. That's why this year's closing night film, Alex Winter's documentary about the original mother of invention titled simply Zappa, is booked alongside the Issa Rae-produced Dark City Beneath the Beat, showcasing Baltimore's club scene. Gill said, "Every year we get people who come up and say, 'I saw this movie and I wasn't really familiar with the artist, and but I checked it out because it was at Sound Unseen and now I want to dig into their catalog."

Even the team can be blindsided by a discovery. Gill pointed out Never Too Late: The Doc Severinsen Story, about Johnny Carson's band leader on The Tonight Show. He said, "I'm 41 years old, so I can remember sneaking out of my bed to watch Johnny Carson with my parents, and I didn't know anything about him. That guy's 90 years old, he's still touring, and his story is incredible."

As for Brunzell, his ears and eyes were opened by this year's centerpiece film The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, and its take on the recording of "Stayin' Alive" – a sequence he compared to Psycho deconstruction 78/52 and its revelatory analysis of Hitchcock's infamous shower scene. "I'd always written them off as cheesy disco, but I was wrong."

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Sound Unseen Film + Music Festival, Nov. 11-15. Passes and individual tickets at www.soundunseen.com.