The sixth edition of the Film Festival for Music Documentaries “Skopje Cinema City” will start on the 19th of September at the Cinematheque of Macedonia. The festival will be divided into two blocks or film weekends: The first weekend will be organized on the 19th and 20th of September when 4 film films will be screened, and the second weekend will take place on the 2nd and 3rd of October when 6 other films will be screened.
The film which will open the festival is “Decades” by Mike Christie about the band New Order. The band is the “Artist in Focus” at the festival. Each edition of Skopje Cinema City is opened by a film about a certain artist and this artist or band is being awarded a Lifetime Award for Achievements in Music and Film.
This year, New Order are artists in focus and the Festival has sent the award in Manchester. Past artists who were recipients of the award are David Bowie (2015), Leonard Cohen (2016), Ryuichi Sakamoto (2018), Philip Glass (2019), and Vlatko Stefanovski (2019).
“The award expresses our deep appreciation of the band’s music which has served as the soundtrack to our lives and proven to be an indelible part of contemporary culture. New Order’s songs are a near-perfect meeting of heart and mind, as well as musical innovation and fearless experimentation. A forward-looking and restless unit, their inspiration took them to strange but beautiful places and as a result, their music has watermarked the music scenes starting from the ’80s to this day. This certainly makes them artists worthy of our admiration and celebration,” said the organizer.
The second film is an intimate portrait of renowned music photographer and feature film director Anton Corbijn, “Inside-Out” by Klaartje Quirijns. This Dutch photographer is a master lensman whose four decades of stunning portraits of some of the greatest artists in the music world and beyond have made him one of the most influential portrait photographers of our time. Even if the name is unfamiliar, chances are you have seen his photographs somewhere. He has been capturing music history through his camera lens since the late ’70s.
His are the photographs that adorn the front covers of most U2 albums-most famously, The Joshua Tree (Island, 1987)-and his are the publicity photos that dictate the group’s public image. Tom Waits, Depeche Mode, REM, Captain Beefheart, Nirvana, Metallica, The Killers, to name but a few, are just some of the artists whose public image is marked by his photographs. His accolades actually stretch beyond this as, until recently, he was a sought-after video director with more than 80 videos to his credit, until he began working on feature films. This film portrays Corbijn totally immersed in his work and paints the pictures of his public and private personae in a nonlinear fashion.
The festival is organized by Nomad-Art Skopje in cooperation with the Cinematheque of Macedonia. The author of the artwork is Dijana Dimitrievska. The festival is helped by the Film Fund Agency of Macedonia.
