Sound Unseen Film and Music Festival is coming to the Minneapolis Parkway Theater and Cloudland in November, showcasing documentaries, short films and music videos.
Director of Sound Unseen Jim Brunzell and his team spent a year planning the film and music festival and choosing what films and artists to feature. At Sound Unseen, there are around 50 films being shown, Brunzell said. There are also six music videos and ten live music performances.
The festival showcases once a year with interactive panels, live music performances and rare concert footage. After the festival hits Minneapolis, it will also go to Rochester and Austin.
Sound Unseen has a dedicated following in Minneapolis, Brunzell said. Putting the festival together is not Brunzell and his team’s main gig either.
“All of us have full-time jobs,” Brunzell said. “We do this because we care. And it makes the Twin Cities a cooler place to live.”
Sound Unseen Film and Music Festival is coming to the Minneapolis Parkway Theater and Cloudland from Nov. 13-17. The festival began in 1999 and was founded to reflect the Twin Cities’ vibrant music community, Brunzell said. The festival continues because it is a fixture in the Twin Cities.
“We feel like it’s our job to bring these films to town because otherwise, no one else in town is gonna show these films,” Brunzell said.
The 25th-anniversary edition of the festival is showing films like Chris Smith’s “DEVO,” Don Hardy’s “Linda Perry: Let it Die Here,” Don McGlynn’s “Spider John Koerner: Been Here…Done That” and many more.
The DEVO tribute band, REVO, will perform after the “DEVO” screening. Linda Perry, from 4 Non Blondes, will be performing live acoustic music as well. Additional performances include the Austin, Minnesota folk singer Charlie Parr, soul and R&B singer Swamp Dogg, alternative country singer-songwriter Lydia Loveless and Minneapolis glam-punk artist Venus DeMars.
“1-800-On-Her-Own” is a documentary by Dana Flor about Ani DiFranco, a musician and feminist icon, being shown at the festival. The film is an intercut of her past and present life, Flor said.
“I really centered on her as a feminist, because that has really been the guiding light of her music, of her activism, and who she is as a person,” Flor said.
The filmmaking process started in 2019 and ended this year. Flor said the overturning of Roe v. Wade had a huge impact on DiFranco and the film. The film finished right when Kamala Harris started campaigning for president. The film then did a Midwest swing state tour and fundraised for Emily’s List, a political action committee aiming to help elect a female president to protect abortion rights.
“The film itself is sort of taking a page from Ani DiFranco’s life as an activist,” Flor said.
“Chainsaws Were Singing” is an action-horror-musical-comedy Estonian film by Sander Maran showing at the festival. Jan Andresson, a co-producer and master of gore effects, said the film takes inspiration from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “Les Misérables.”
The film itself took ten years to edit, Andresson said. Maran edited the film himself and taught himself color-grading, musical orchestration and visual effects.
“He’s really precise,” Andresson said. “So it took ten years.”
The shooting process lasted 62 days in 2013. According to Andresson, there were a lot of back-to-back 12-hour days and a lot of time and work went into this to create the exact horror escapism film.
Now, “Chainsaws Were Singing” is winning film festival awards. It won best horror picture at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas.
Andresson tried to make the plot unbelievable and the horror elements more comedic as well.
“It’s just a brain-free, relaxing and fun type of film,” Andresson said. “Leave every good taste you have behind doors while watching this.”
Another documentary showing is “Born To Be Wild: The Story Of Steppenwolf” by Oliver Schwehm.
The film tells the story of the German and Canadian rock band late 1960s band Steppenwolf and highlights the friendship between vocalist John Kay and bassist Nick St. Nicholas. The pair had not spoken to each other since 1971, Schwehm said. Schwehm used original footage and testimonials from band members recorded during the band’s heyday.
The bass player, Nick St. Nicholas had a garage full of archives of never seen before film reels. Schwehm convinced St. Nicholas to let him borrow the reels, take them to Germany and digitize them.
The film initially debuted at the Munich Film Festival this year. After that festival, Schwehm had to redo the ending, in order to add how Kay and St. Nicholas rekindled their friendship when they went to see the film in Munich.
In all, Schwehm hopes to spark interest in Steppenwolf again.
“I really wanted people to get really interested in their sound, which was quite revolutionary,” Schwehm said. “Especially because, and this is very strange, they are still not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.”
It is a stressful time to be alive right now, Brunzell said. He just wants people to enjoy the festival experience.
