Cinema Versa is the home of documentaries inspired by the underground festival aesthetic, running two major themes, Music on Film and Underground Voices, incorporating live special events and collaborations to enhance the all round experience of the Film Festival.
Underground Voices champions human rights, mavericks and outsiders from the first Rastafarian community in First Rasta to Eco-Pirate Paul Watson and a history of LSD, The Substance.
Music on Film profiles styles ranging from alt-bluegrass with artists Split Lip Rayfield in Never Make it Home, to Britpop and Pulp in The Beat is the Law to the soaring post-rock of Icelandic band Sigur Ros in the stunning new concert film Inni.
Special events include a continued partnership with Arts and Minds and the Time to Change initiative on attitudes to mental health, we will be welcoming guest lecturer and psychiatrist Dr Peter Byrne to introduce a discussion on cinema and mental health with a range of film screenings including Hitchcock’s Psycho and Polanski’s Repulsion. We also have a salsa night and an American folk film showcase with live music, a new collaboration with Leeds Asylum Seekers Support Network and a week of militant cinema at The Space.
- Architects of Harmonic Rooms & Records-Moving Image present a selection of video documents from their archives that reveal a world of ingenious, underground musicians and artists. This includes a video collaboration with Harappian Night Recordings celebrating the rich psychedelic world of obscure 1960s/70s Asian horror movies, a video profile of the renowned John Fahey/Robbie Basho [...]Click to read more about this film »
- Awake My Soul explores the history, music, and traditions of Sacred Harp singing; a haunting, powerful form of American spiritual music that has its roots in the deep South. Sung almost exclusively in large groups, Sacred Harp emphasises participation and community, singing together rousing songs of beauty and sorrow, of life and death; songs that [...]Click to read more about this film »
- Beats, Rhymes & Life follows one of the most influential and groundbreaking musical groups in hip-hop history. A Tribe Called Quest’s sudden break-up in 1998 shocked the industry and saddened the scores of fans, whose appetite for the group’s innovative musical stylings never seems to diminish. A hard-core fan himself, Rapaport sets out on tour [...]Click to read more about this film »
- Presented in partnership with Together for Peace with a discussion on the Israeli-Palestinian struggle for peace. Budrus is an award-winning documentary about a Palestinian community organizer, Ayed Morrar, who unites local Fatah and Hamas members along with Israeli supporters in an unarmed movement to save his village of Budrus from destruction by Israel’s Separation Barrier. [...]Click to read more about this film »
- Convento is a poetic documentary, introducing an eccentric family of Dutch artists who live in a converted 400-year-old Portuguese Monastery, Sao Francisco. Christiaan Zwanikken is a kinetic artist who reanimates skeletal parts and deceased wildlife with servomotors and robotics. His parents, ex-ballet dancer Geraldine and her late husband Kees, a successful photographer, came to Portugal [...]Click to read more about this film »
- Morphine were one of the great underground American bands of the 90s, led by the charismatic singer songwriter Mark Sandman who tragically died onstage in Italy in 1999 aged only 47. Cure for Pain examines his life and work from his troubled family background to his rise through various bands in his youth to the [...]Click to read more about this film »
- A subtle, intimate documentary portraying family life, Daughters of Malakeh transcends its gentle subject to create an insightful expose of gender politics in Iranian life. In public, Maryam wears a headscarf and obeys the rules of the state. But in the privacy of her own home, she’s the breadwinner who runs the show, along with [...]Click to read more about this film »
- Eco-Pirate profiles the controversial environmental crusader Captain Paul Watson, a man on a mission to save the planet and its oceans. He repeatedly flouts the law to apprehend what he sees as the more serious law-breakers, the illegal poachers of the world. Featuring gripping verité sequences shot aboard his ship, the film interrogates his personal [...]Click to read more about this film »
- A claustrophobic and disturbing documentary, brilliantly executed (excuse the morbid pun) and shot entirely in a motel room on the US/Mexican border. El Sicario Room 164 is a feature length conversation with a masked Juarez hit man: he has killed hundreds of people, is an expert in torture and kidnapping, and even received some training [...]Click to read more about this film »
- A selection of the best short films about mental health. Includes work from the Arts & Minds Film Production Group, a Leeds based project that encourages people with personal experience of mental health issues to make films. Films include ‘Diagnosis Psychosis’, a humorous look at Hollywood cliché and “The Bus Stop” the story of one [...]Click to read more about this film »
