Screening times:
Friday, November 10, 6:30 PM - SOLD OUT
Friday, November 10, 9:00 PM - Half-capacity screening
Saturday, November 11, 6:30 PM - SOLD OUT
Saturday, November 11, 9:00 PM - Half-capacity screening
Karen O'Connor, Miri Navasky, Maeve O'Boyle | Documentary | USA | 2023 | 113m
Neither a conventional biopic nor a traditional concert film, Joan Baez I Am A Noise is a raw and intimate portrait of the legendary folk singer and activist that shifts back and forth through time. It follows Joan on her final tour as she looks back on a 60 year career and delves into her extraordinary archive, including newly discovered home movies, diaries, artwork, therapy tapes, and audio recordings. Baez is remarkably revealing about her life on and off stage - from her lifelong emotional struggles to her civil rights work with Dr Martin Luther King and a heartbreaking romance with a young Bob Dylan. A searingly honest look at a living legend, this film is a compelling and deeply personal exploration of an iconic artist who has never told the full truth of her life, as she experienced it, until now.
From co-director Karen O'Connor's directors' statement:
For over twenty years, co-directors Miri Navasky, Maeve O'Boyle, and I have made character-driven documentary films that explore complex social issues, from transgender kids and mentally ill prisoners to global warming and abortion rights. Tackling a biography for the first time, as we did with I Am A Noise, was a daunting but exciting filmmaking challenge, especially with a legend like Joan Baez.
Documentaries about well-known people are inherently tricky. Typically, much is already known and a presented narrative is often carefully curated and controlled. But Baez, who has been a good friend of mine since 1989, was ready as never before to take an unflinching look at her own life--free of hagiography and dewy-eyed nostalgia.
Although Joan understood, from the beginning, that she wouldn't have any control over the film, there was never a time when she held back or hesitated from digging into the harder, darker truths of her life, which gave us a rare opportunity to make a film about Joan Baez that could be as honest, complicated, funny and layered as the woman herself.
"The folk singer and counterculture veteran Joan Baez is the subject of this intimate and painful documentary, which brings us to the brink of a terribly traumatic revelation that it can't quite bear to spell out." -Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
"The celebrated folk singer and activist was singing about civil rights, of course. But what we learn in the thoughtful, thorough and sometimes harrowingly intimate Joan Baez: I Am a Noise is that Baez was also seeking to overcome much on a personal scale." -Jocelyn Noveck, Associated Press
"A coherent, cohesive, and sometimes jarringly frank portrait." -Glenn Kenny, rogerebert.com
Tickets $8.75 ($8 cash at the door if available).
SOLD OUT
SOLD OUT
Half capacity
Half capacity
