The Montclair Film Festival (MFF) has announced that filmmaker Sam Green and critically acclaimed indie rock band Yo La Tengo will perform The Love Song Of R. Buckminster Fuller live at the 2015 Montclair Film Festival on Thurday, May 7th, at The Wellmont Theater in Montclair, NJ. Tickets are $35 for the main floor and loge, $25 for the balcony, with special pricing for MFF Members, and are available online now at www.montclairfilmfest.org
The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller is a “live documentary” by Academy Award-nominated director Sam Green (The Weather Underground) featuring a live score by the legendary indie rock band Yo La Tengo.
This performance will feature Green narrating the film in person and cuing images from a laptop while Yo La Tengo perform their original score. The work features a unique combination of film clips and live music, as Green’s in person cinematic narration draws inspiration equally from old travelogues, the Benshi tradition, and TED talks.
The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller traces the career of twentieth-century futurist, architect, engineer, inventor, and author R. Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983). An early proponent of environmental stewardship, Fuller spoke persuasively about contemporary design and architecture’s ability to tackle issues of sustainability and conservation, and to stimulate radical societal change.
This is the first announced program of the 2015 Montclair Film Festival, taking place May 10, 2015. The announcement of the complete 2015 MFF program will take place April 2, 2015. Tickets for the full festival program go one sale Wednesday, April 8th for MFF Members and Sponsors, with public tickets on sale Monday April 13th.
About Sam Green
Sam Green is a New York-based documentary filmmaker. He received his Master’s Degree in Journalism from University of California Berkeley, where he studied documentary with acclaimed filmmaker Marlon Riggs. Green’s most recent projects are the “live documentaries” The Measure of All Things, (2014), The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller (with Yo La Tengo) (2012), and Utopia in Four Movements (2010). With all of these works, Green narrates the film in-person while musicians perform a live soundtrack.
Green’s 2004 feature-length film, the Academy Award-nominated documentary The Weather Underground, tells the story of a group of radical young women and men who tried to violently overthrow the United States government during the late 1960s and 70s. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, was broadcast on PBS, included in the Whitney Biennial, and has screened widely around the world.
Green is also a prolific maker of short documentaries, including: The Rainbow Man/John 3:16, lot 63, grave c, Pie Fight ’69 (directed with Christian Bruno), N-Judah 5:30, and The Fabulous Stains: Behind the Movie (directed with Sarah Jacobson). He has received grants from the Creative Capital, Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations, as well as the National Endowment for the Arts. www.samgreen.to
About Yo La Tengo
Yo La Tengo is one of the most beloved and respected bands in America. For nearly thirty years, Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley and James McNew have enjoyed success entirely on their own terms – playing the world’s best concert halls, museums, and dives, dominating critics’ lists, doing a Simpsons theme, playing the Velvet Underground in I Shot Andy Warhol, and sharing stages with some of the most important musicians of our time. Since forming in Hoboken, New Jersey, they’ve recorded twelve studio albums, written soundtracks to the films Junebug, Shortbus, and Old Joy, and provided a score for the surrealist aquatic films of Jean Painlevé. Their most recent album Fade was released in January 2013 on Matador Records.
About MFF
The Montclair Film Festival, Inc. (MFF), a non-profit, tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization, nurtures and showcases the talents of filmmakers from around the region and world. MFF unites, empowers, educates and celebrates our region’s diverse cultural heritage and robust artistic community by presenting an annual spring festival and a growing assortment of engaging programs and events all year long. The fourth annual spring festival will take place from May 1 through 10, 2015. MFF 2015 is made possible through generous support from Investors Bank, Audi, HackensackUMC Mountainside, Chubb, Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage, Horizon Foundation for New Jersey, and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, among others. For information about MFF, visit www.montclairfilmfest.org.
