Film & Music Festival
Amazing sights, sounds
By Phil Villarreal
Pvillarreal@azstarnet.com
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 10.09.2008
If your passions lie where movies and music intersect, the Tucson Film & Music Festival is your kind of thing.
Entering its fourth year, the event features concerts, documentaries, shorts, narrative features and videos that are based on music or are connected with the Southwest.
"We have a really diverse, amazing lineup this year that rivals anything we've done before," said Michael Toubassi, the festival's director.
"We've got great music documentaries, eclectic live music and a real taste of some of the best Southwestern filmmaking currently going on," he said.
Festival-goers should expect to see a wide range of entertainment, Toubassi said.
For example, "Throw Down Your Heart," the documentary that will open the festival tonight, follows banjoist Bela Fleck as he visits Africa and records an album. The film debuted at the South by Southwest Film Festival in March and won an audience award. You can watch a preview at aznightbuzz.com/ tucsonfilm.
Another highlight is the documentary "Slide Guitar Ride," which is described as a musical journey with Tucson slide guitarist Bob Log III.
The festival also includes several world and national premieres, including Norwood Cheek's "The Skooks."
On the music end, artists who have work in the festival will be playing concerts at Plush this weekend. They include Margot and the Nuclear So & So's, who have a video in the festival, and Gram Rabbit, featured in the film "Nowhere Now: The Ballad of Joshua Tree."
The festival got its start in 2005, when a Toubassi film, "High and Dry: Where the Desert Meets Rock 'n' Roll," premiered during Club Congress' 20th-anniversary celebration.
It became the Tucson Film & Music Festival and stayed part of Downtown's Labor Day festivities for the next couple of years.
It branched out this year after organizers and sponsors agreed that it would be better to move the festival to Columbus Day weekend.
"We realized that Labor Day weekend already has several other conflicting major film festival events at that time," Toubassi said, citing the Telluride Film Festival as one example.
The Tucson Film & Music Festival also expanded to more theaters and has its new music headquarters at Plush.
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