What do Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Garbage, and countless other alt-rock heavyweights have in common? All of them created music at Smart Studios, the legendary recording facility founded by Butch Vig and Steve Marker. Drawing on never-before-seen arc...
Wednesday April 13, 2016 7:30pm - 9:00pm PDT
Music Box Theatre3733 N. Southport Ave.
Chicago-based music documentarian and frequent Brian Wilson collaborator, John Anderson presents remastered versions of this short doc and concert film commemorating the Beach Boys’ 50th anniversary of one of the greatest recordings in rock hist...
Thursday April 14, 2016 7:00pm - 7:56pm PDT
Logan Theatre2937 N Milwaukee Ave
When a family of Polish musicians encounter two winsome mermaid sisters named Silver and Golden, they do what anyone else would in their situation-- recruit them to join their band. After performing at a neon-lit Warsaw dance club, Silver becomes roma...
Thursday April 14, 2016 7:00pm - 8:32pm PDT
The Society for Arts1112 N Milwaukee Ave,
Sidney is a bisexual, glam rock dilettante trying to make his lofty dreams of becoming a successful musician a reality. By night, he goes full-blown drag queen and takes the stage at seedy dive bars, but his hedonistic lifestyle is put on hold when hi...
Thursday April 14, 2016 7:15pm - 8:40pm PDT
Logan Theatre2937 N Milwaukee Ave
Not many bands get to play themselves in their own movie–The Beatles, KISS … Savage Beliefs. The local hardcore heroes take on a serial killer in this unearthed gem of a slasher parody/slice of Chicago punk life that's been collecting dus...
Thursday April 14, 2016 8:00pm - 9:28pm PDT
Martyrs'3855 N Lincoln Ave
Storming out of rural Alberta, The smalls were quasi-punks in John Deere caps equally influenced by hardcore, speed metal, country, and jazz. Through the 1990s the quartet carried the flag for culturally overlooked Western Canada, building a rabid fan...
Thursday April 14, 2016 9:00pm - 10:43pm PDT
Logan Theatre2937 N Milwaukee Ave
In 1973, Jalal Mansur Nuriddin, a member of the legendary poetry and music group The Last Poets, released an album that changed the face of music and would later cement Nuriddin's status as "The Grandfather of Rap." Released under the pseudonym of Lig...
Thursday April 14, 2016 9:15pm - 10:48pm PDT
Logan Theatre2937 N Milwaukee Ave
As a teenager in Chicago's Hyde Park, Paul Butterfield broke cultural barriers by traveling to tough South and West Side neighborhoods to learn at the feet of Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and Little Walter, then carried the blues torch to the predomina...
Friday April 15, 2016 7:00pm - 7:40pm PDT
The Society for Arts1112 N Milwaukee Ave,
Jamaica is not generally known for a progressive penal system, but at Kingston’s notorious General Penitentiary inmates have access to musical training, a radio station, and recording facilities as part of a program officials credit with signifi...
Friday April 15, 2016 7:00pm - 8:19pm PDT
Comfort Station2579 N Milwaukee Ave
A heart-warming, hard-to-resist, down-home indie blues odyssey about a group of disparate–and broke–souls who come together to save a Mississippi blues club, and themselves. Winningly off-kilter and chock-full of non-actor faces give this ...
Friday April 15, 2016 7:00pm - 8:27pm PDT
Logan Theatre2937 N Milwaukee Ave
Twenty-five years before Fela Kuti's life became the stuff of Broadway, this crackling French-made documentary captured the impossibly charismatic Afrobeat king and self-styled "Black President" at the peak of his musical, political, and spiritual pow...
Friday April 15, 2016 7:00pm - 8:30pm PDT
Logan Theatre2937 N Milwaukee Ave
Quick: Which TV music show has won both a Peabody Award and the National Medal of Arts? Austin City Limits. A Song for You makes clear why. Featuring a bevy of pivotal performances by everybody from Willie Nelson and Jack White to Ray Charles...
A fresh look into Norway's notorious black metal scene from a striking new angle. While the genre's Norwegian pioneers settle into middle age, wiping off the corpse paint and embracing family life, three obsessive fans from vastly different religious ...
Friday April 15, 2016 8:30pm - 9:43pm PDT
Logan Theatre2937 N Milwaukee Ave
Filmed over three nights in London, 'And So Say All of Us' showcases The Ex live celebrating their "33 1/3 anniversary." But this was no exercise in nostalgia: these Dutch underground legends have always looked forward, never back, and this euphoric c...
Friday April 15, 2016 8:45pm - 10:12pm PDT
The Society for Arts1112 N Milwaukee Ave,
In the late 1920s, to feed America's growing appetite for music on wax, record companies dispatched scouts to the hinterlands with portable recording equipment. They captured the raw artistry heretofore hidden in rural towns, mountain hollers, and inn...
Doug Sahm started out life as a country music prodigy, then a teenage R&B dynamo who famously caused a riot at his high school. Sahm later emerged as an international rock star as the frontman of the Sir Douglas Quintet. He landed in San Francisco...
Friday April 15, 2016 9:15pm - 10:38pm PDT
Logan Theatre2937 N Milwaukee Ave
A special evening devoted to the musical underground featuring members of Rodan, Lambchop, and Grifters. Half-Cocked, the debut of filmmaking couple Suki Hawley and Michael Galinsky, incisively renders the highs, lows, and bored in-betweens o...
Friday April 15, 2016 10:30pm - 11:51pm PDT
Logan Theatre2937 N Milwaukee Ave
The absolute height of '80s chic, The Hunger is largely remembered today for its steamy Deneuve-on-Sarandon action. But the best stuff in this relentlessly stylish vampirotic thriller happens before the famous sapphic interlude – namely...
Friday April 15, 2016 11:00pm - Saturday April 16, 2016 12:36am PDT
Logan Theatre2937 N Milwaukee Ave
Join in a musical adventure of animated and live-action short films from around the world–sock puppet back-up singers serenading BB King; an unlikely group of buddies make a perfect Rumba rhythm section for a sleepy bandleader. From R&B, jaz...
Saturday April 16, 2016 11:00am - 12:04pm PDT
Logan Theatre2937 N Milwaukee Ave
Considered one of the greatest violinists of the 20th century, Yehudi Menuhin would be 100 this year. Menuhin was not only a master classical violinist, but a musical explorer who worked with greats like Ravi Shankar and jazz violinist Stéphane...
Saturday April 16, 2016 11:00am - 1:10pm PDT
1st Ward
A haunting story of a secret childhood trauma resurfacing, sixty years later, to unravel the life of Holocaust survivor Sonia Reich. The film follows her son, Chicago Tribune jazz critic Howard Reich, as he journeys across the United States and Easter...
Saturday April 16, 2016 11:30am - 12:27pm PDT
Logan Theatre2937 N Milwaukee Ave
Chicago-based director John Anderson and producer Maggie Magee capture Brian Wilson and his band's first live US performance of SMiLE in 2004–37 years after the Beach Boys visionary abandoned his orchestral pop masterwork. Originally released as part ...
Saturday April 16, 2016 12:00pm - 12:52pm PDT
The Society for Arts1112 N Milwaukee Ave,
Dutch filmmaker Ramón Gieling's documentary is less concerned with the history of Johann Sebastian Bach's monumental "St. Matthew Passion" than with the intensely personal response people have to Bach's 3 1/2-hour oratorio version of Christ's f...
Saturday April 16, 2016 12:30pm - 2:00pm PDT
Logan Theatre2937 N Milwaukee Ave
Follow acclaimed director/choreographer Bill T. Jones as he and his company create their most ambitious work, an original dance-theater piece in honor of Abraham Lincoln's Bicentennial.
Saturday April 16, 2016 1:00pm - 2:26pm PDT
Logan Theatre2937 N Milwaukee Ave
In 1966, fresh off the artistic triumph of Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson began recording Smile, a "teenage symphony to God" that was supposed to establish the Beach Boys as rock's reigning imaginative force. Instead it became the great lost album of the 19...
Saturday April 16, 2016 1:45pm - 3:34pm PDT
The Society for Arts1112 N Milwaukee Ave,
Latin boogaloo is New York City–a colorful musical expression that blasted straight from the melting pot streets of Spanish Harlem, Brooklyn, and the Bronx in the 1960s as innovators like Joe Bataan, Johnny Colon, and Pete Rodriguez blended mambo and ...
Saturday April 16, 2016 2:15pm - 3:33pm PDT
Logan Theatre2937 N Milwaukee Ave
An experimental doc on a singular performance at Lukas Piano Service on Chicago’s west side where close to 200 musicians, pros and amateurs alike, adults and children played a myriad of scores from Chopsticks to Chopin all together, all at once....
Saturday April 16, 2016 3:00pm - 3:40pm PDT
1st Ward
Set in the streets of Brooklyn, NY, Beatbox follows Pete, an aspiring DJ and musician who makes ends meet by delivering beer for his girlfriend's family business. When night falls, he escapes to his makeshift home recording studio, where he c...
Saturday April 16, 2016 3:00pm - 4:16pm PDT
Logan Theatre2937 N Milwaukee Ave
Watching Bill Evans hunched intently over 88 keys and hearing the melodious, miraculous sounds he made, it's easy to agree with Tony Bennett that "nobody played with more feeling." During a short life (he died in 1980 at age 51) marred by drug abuse a...
Saturday April 16, 2016 4:00pm - 5:24pm PDT
The Society for Arts1112 N Milwaukee Ave,
Returning to Iceland after a world tour in 2006, Sigur Rós did a series of what would now be called pop-up shows, playing for free at village halls, in open fields, at an abandoned fishery, and an environmental protest camp. That unusual jaunt ...
Saturday April 16, 2016 4:00pm - 5:37pm PDT
Lincoln Hall2424 N Lincoln Ave
Often cited as "The Godfather of Electronic Pop Music," Gary Numan was one of the world’s biggest-selling recording artists in the '70s and '80s. Although songs such as "Cars" and "Are 'Friends' Electric?" were massive hits, no one had ever seen...
Saturday April 16, 2016 5:00pm - 6:25pm PDT
Logan Theatre2937 N Milwaukee Ave
The first music documentary to be nominated for an Academy Award, Festival helped launch the career of CIMMfest’s 2016 Baadasssss honoree Gordon Quinn, one of the editors who cut together this synthesis of the 1963 to 1966 Newport Folk Festivals...
In the early 1970s, gangs like the Savage Skulls and Black Spades owned the streets of New York. Setting foot on the wrong block was a ticket to a beatdown or a bullet. But some in this violent subculture sought to channel rage at poverty and police b...
Saturday April 16, 2016 6:00pm - 7:08pm PDT
The Promontory
Why, she's a 25-year-old part cowpunk, part hard rocker, part singer-songwriter sensation from Columbus, Ohio leading a band full of boys into the belly of the music industry and sometimes liking a drink or two along the way. Is she the second coming ...
Saturday April 16, 2016 6:15pm - 8:41pm PDT
Logan Theatre2937 N Milwaukee Ave
Mike Bloomfield first came to national attention in the late-1960s as a member of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, a favorite among the counterculture rock crowd of the era and 2015 inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. As a session guitarist,...
Saturday April 16, 2016 7:00pm - 7:57pm PDT
Comfort Station2579 N Milwaukee Ave
After a Quebecois woman has a heart transplant, she has visions of her donor's former life. She meets and is befriended by the donor's son, a Malian teenager who believes she is his mother reincarnated, and her life changes dramatically. Marie Brassar...
Saturday April 16, 2016 7:00pm - 8:19pm PDT
Facets1517 W Fullerton Ave
Ezra, an American writer of Palestinian and Israeli parentage living in Berlin, spends his life clubbing, taking drugs, having pseudo-philosophical conversations, and wanting to be more punk. He wishes he wrote more, but instead spends most of his tim...
Saturday April 16, 2016 7:00pm - 8:32pm PDT
Logan Theatre2937 N Milwaukee Ave
A 40th anniversary screening of the cult classic outlaw country doc featuring performances by some of mid-70s Nashville's finest, including Guy Clark, David Allan Coe, a pre-"Devil Went Down to Georgia" Charlie Daniels, and up-and-comers Steve Earle a...
Springing from the "live fast, die hard" rebel attitude of '50s greaser counterculture, rockabilly isn't just a fashion statement, it's a way of life. It represents the seedier side of a bygone era, filled with bombshell pinup girls, tricked out hot r...
Saturday April 16, 2016 8:00pm - 9:15pm PDT
The Society for Arts1112 N Milwaukee Ave,
A deep exploration into the art of recording and producing music, Soundbreaking offers a behind-the-scenes look at the birth of both new and classic sounds. Featuring incredible new interviews with some of the most celebrated artists and prod...
Saturday April 16, 2016 8:45pm - 10:30pm PDT
Logan Theatre2937 N Milwaukee Ave
A pulsating documentary charting the extraordinary life and career of James Lavelle, an underground DJ, music producer, and global trip-hop mogul. With exclusive access to personal home footage spanning the last three decades, we experience the rare o...
Saturday April 16, 2016 9:00pm - 10:50pm PDT
Logan Theatre2937 N Milwaukee Ave
Abetted by a passel of Nobel Prize-winning economists, a bevy of puppets, an abundance of sprightly original songs, and actor/activist John Cusack, Monty Python's Terry Jones examines the history of financial bubbles – a centuries-old tale that mainst...
Saturday April 16, 2016 9:45pm - 10:59pm PDT
Comfort Station2579 N Milwaukee Ave
A touching Indian film about a terminally ill megastar acting in his last movie about an 8th-century legend whose life is a distant mirror of his own. This film’s conventional start opens up to a funny, poignant, unexpected and moving movie with...
Saturday April 16, 2016 9:45pm - Sunday April 17, 2016 12:36am PDT
The Society for Arts1112 N Milwaukee Ave,
This infamous, rarely screened BBC doc, filmed as David Bowie sloughed off the theatrical gigantism of the Diamond Dogs tour in favor of the sleek plastic soul of Young Americans, captures the star in mid-70s extremis–lost in Hollywood, adrift i...
Saturday April 16, 2016 10:45pm - 11:38pm PDT
Logan Theatre2937 N Milwaukee Ave
Adam Green of The Moldy Peaches wrote, directed, scored, and heads a hipster dream cast–Macauley Culkin, Devendra Banhart, Alia Shawkat, Har Mar Superstar–in this pixilated, sexed-up musical take on the classic Arabian Nights tale of a boy...
Saturday April 16, 2016 11:00pm - Sunday April 17, 2016 12:30am PDT
Logan Theatre2937 N Milwaukee Ave
A “hip op-era” musical drama follows a young Haitian immigrant and his family in Montreal, and through the years becomes the proud leader of a hip hop group. He takes over his brother’s enterprise, using the illicit gains to record a...
Sunday April 17, 2016 12:00pm - 1:33pm PDT
Logan Theatre2937 N Milwaukee Ave
Keith Richards, Lucinda Williams, Robert Cray, BB King, Sam Carr and Joe Perry share their stories and their love for Mississippi bluesman, David “Honeyboy” Edwards.
This history of the blues–its roots and personal accounts o...
Sunday April 17, 2016 12:00pm - 2:52pm PDT
The Society for Arts1112 N Milwaukee Ave,
Interviews with–and lots of music by–Chicago blues artists that follow the remarkable 30-year history of the Chicago-based Earwig Records, and offers a unique perspective on the Chicago blues scene. Based around a 2009 Blues concert on the...
Sunday April 17, 2016 12:00pm - 2:52pm PDT
The Society for Arts1112 N Milwaukee Ave,
On the edge of Israel’s Negev Desert lies Sderot, a city of factory workers and rock musicians–the children of refugees from North Africa and the Middle East. Despite being pummeled for years by homemade missiles, the people of Sderot pers...
Sunday April 17, 2016 12:15pm - 1:48pm PDT
Logan Theatre2937 N Milwaukee Ave
This companion piece to the documentary series American Epic (two episodes also screening at CIMMfest) replicates the atmosphere of seminal 1920s field recordings down to the smallest detail, with a world-beating cast of artists recording str...
Sunday April 17, 2016 2:00pm - 3:30pm PDT
Logan Theatre2937 N Milwaukee Ave
In a region full of turmoil and instability, a generation of progressive, creative young Arabs struggle to express themselves freely and promote more liberal attitudes within their societies. Yallah! Underground follows musicians, rappers, an...
Sunday April 17, 2016 2:15pm - 3:39pm PDT
Logan Theatre2937 N Milwaukee Ave
The legendary Maxwell Street market-Chicago's fabled kaleidoscope of races, religions, bargain hunters and street musicians-is captured in all its grit and hot-dog mustard glory in this cult classic of cinema-verite filmmaking; an early example of Gor...
Sunday April 17, 2016 3:00pm - 3:50pm PDT
Comfort Station2579 N Milwaukee Ave
Follow a year in the life of a legend, Ton Koopman. A virtuoso harpsichordist and organist, he is the founder and director of famed Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra and Choir. His beginnings were of an anti-establishment figure who performed at Vietnam War...
Sunday April 17, 2016 3:30pm - 5:00pm PDT
The Society for Arts1112 N Milwaukee Ave,
On July 3, 1973, David Bowie closed a year of nearly nonstop touring with a show in London. But it wasn't just the tour Bowie ended that night at the Hammersmith Odeon, known to only a few of his closest associates, he planned to retire his extraterre...
Sunday April 17, 2016 3:45pm - 5:15pm PDT
Lincoln Hall2424 N Lincoln Ave
Touted as an "unromantic comedy about extinction" is exactly what you get in this wonderful and wacky tour of Toronto's urban angsts, imponderables, and sexual borderlands. It has a winning hey-gang-let's-all-make-a-movie quality that gives depth to t...
Sunday April 17, 2016 3:45pm - 5:25pm PDT
Logan Theatre2937 N Milwaukee Ave
When guitarist and composer Robbie Basho died in 1986, he was so little-regarded that all his records were out of print. In the 30 years since, a small but fervent cult has coalesced around Basho's mystic air; his masterful synthesis of country-blues ...
Sunday April 17, 2016 5:00pm - 6:23pm PDT
Logan Theatre2937 N Milwaukee Ave
Releasing only a dozen-odd recordings, but profoundly shaping the course of indie music, record labels Fast Product and Postcard Records formed in late-70s Edinburgh and early-80s Glasgow respectively, launched several key bands including Gang of Four...
Sunday April 17, 2016 5:15pm - 6:45pm PDT
The Society for Arts1112 N Milwaukee Ave,
Music meets the Mob in this biography of '60s hitmaker and 2016 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Bert Berns. A prolific songwriter ("Twist and Shout," "Piece of My Heart," "Hang on Sloopy") and producer (Solomon Burke, Van Morrison) with an output ...
Sunday April 17, 2016 6:15pm - 7:49pm PDT
Logan Theatre2937 N Milwaukee Ave
“No decent man sitting in public and listening to music should get sexually aroused,” explained an Iranian religious scholar to composer Sara Najafi on why her plan to hold a concert of women singers in Tehran violates Islam. But this pass...
Since the 1920s, when photos of country music's founding fathers and mothers "looked as if the Old Testament had come to life" (as Marty Stuart puts it), the genre has never been shy of iconic looks. Drawing on the archives and observations of great N...
Sunday April 17, 2016 6:45pm - 8:13pm PDT
Logan Theatre2937 N Milwaukee Ave
A fabulous excursion into Latin jazz with all-star pianists Michel Camilo, Chucho Valdes, and Gonzalo Rubalcaba narrating the story and playing the music of the renowned, revered Cuban composer and pianist Ernesto Lecuona. Singers Ana Belen and Omara ...
Sunday April 17, 2016 7:15pm - 9:09pm PDT
The Society for Arts1112 N Milwaukee Ave,
After being buried alive as a heretic in the 17th century, Carmilla awakens from her grave to seek revenge in rural Iowa, but spares the life of a beautiful biker girl. A haunting bluegrass score in gorgeous black and white with shadow animation.
Sunday April 17, 2016 8:15pm - 9:29pm PDT
Logan Theatre2937 N Milwaukee Ave
The operatic story of Beach Boys genius Brian Wilson is told in intertwining threads in what A.O. Scott of The New York Times called a "smart, compassionate, refreshingly unconventional biopic" that "explores the mental world and the artistic...
Sunday April 17, 2016 8:30pm - 10:31pm PDT
Logan Theatre2937 N Milwaukee Ave
