Cinéma Vérité to unfold story of Rockfield Studios
TEHRAN –(Iranart)- “Rockfield, the Studio on the Farm”, a UK documentary by Hannah Berryman, will go on screen in the World’s Best category of the 14th edition of Cinéma Vérité, Iran’s major international festival for documentary films.
The documentary is the unlikely tale of how two Welsh farming brothers turned their dairy farm into one of the most successful recording studios of all time, producing four decades of legendary rock music.
Fifty years ago, deep in the Welsh countryside, brothers Kingsley and Charles Ward were starting out in the family dairy farming business. But they yearned to do something different, they wanted to make music. So they built a studio in the attic of their farmhouse and started recording with their friends. Kingsley’s new wife, Ann, left her job in the local bank to do the books, and they continued farming all the while. Animals were kicked out of barns and musicians were moved into Nan’s spare bedroom. Inadvertently, they’d launched the world’s first independent residential recording studio, Rockfield.
Rockfield’s reputation spread like wildfire, quickly garnering international acclaim as the place where bands wanted to record. From Black Sabbath, Hawkwind and Queen, to Simple Minds, Iggy Pop and Robert Plant, and later Oasis, The Stone Roses, The Charlatans, Manic Street Preachers and Coldplay – an unbelievable roll call of artists have recorded there over the decades.
Due to the pandemic, this year’s Cinéma Vérité will be running totally online from December 15 to 22.
The festival will review the Chilean documentary cinema during a special program named “Chilean Films Panorama”. A number of acclaimed documentaries by Chilean filmmakers, including Francisco Bermejo’s documentary “The Other One”, will be screened in this section.
A number of top Iranian and international documentarians and critics will be holding online workshops and panel discussions during the festival.
Twenty-five films on COVID-19 will also be competing in Cinéma Vérité in the special category set up this year to attract attention to this disastrous disease.
source: Tehran Times