Soundwatch Berlin Music Film Festival

From 7 to 16 November 2018 the second edition of Soundwatch Music Film Festival Berlin will take place in Berlin.

Venues are the Lichtblick cinema, City Kino Wedding, Sputnik and the Czech center Berlin. The program includes about 15 documentary films and a VJ performance, presented in the presence of filmmakers, musicians and experts on the subjects featured in the films. The main topic this year is city and music.

In addition to portraits of the early punk scene in London, Techno in Detroit, Hip Hop and Hardcore in Budapest and others. Soundwatch presents the Berlin premiere of the VJ Performance Built to Last - Relics of Communist Era Architecture, a search for traces of the socialist modern with archive material, today's recordings, samples and specially composed, electronic score. The congenial performance venue is the Czech center Berlin, which is located in the style-defining brutal embassy building of the architect couple Vera and Vladimir Machonin. Another focus is the radicalizing influence of Black Power on jazz, funk and soul in the United States after 1968, a heyday for innovative sounds and strong social statements.

The festival will open on November 7 at City Kino Wedding with the Berlin premiere of Here to Be Heard - The Story of the Slits (directed by William Badgley, UK 2017). The film tells the story of The Slits, the world's first women's punk band. The Slits extended the collective middle finger to Britain's patriarchal class society in the mid-1970s, shattering gender roles and crusting notions of (male) virtuosity and tried-and-tested new forms of musical expression. Punk and postpunk, dub reggae and later world music mingled into a unique sound. After the film Tessa Pollitt (former bassist of the Slits), Gudrun Gut (musician, producer and label boss), Christina Mohr (music journalist) discusses women in punk with Melissa Perales (organizer of the Torstrassenfestival).