Post by the Scribe on Sept 5, 2020 19:45:14 GMT
www.lindaandthemockingbirds.com/
LINDA AND THE MOCKINGBIRDS
is a road movie with music — a song-soaked, foot-stomping trip straight to the heart of what it means to be Mexican, and to be American, and the complex joy of being both at the same time.
Linda is Linda Ronstadt and The Mockingbirds are Los Cenzontles ("mockingbirds" in the Nahuatl language), a band and a music academy for young people in the San Francisco Bay Area. In this documentary by award-winning director and producer James Keach, we ride with Ronstadt, musician Jackson Browne, and a busload of Cenzontles from Arizona to the little town of Banámichi in Sonora, Mexico, where Ronstadt's grandfather was born.
On the way we learn of Ronstadt's long friendship with Eugene Rodriguez, a third-generation Mexican-American and musician who founded the Cenzontles 30 years ago to reconnect working-class kids with the dignity and beauty of their ancestral music and culture. It worked so well, and the Cenzontles became musicians of such skill and heart, that they drew admirers and collaborators like Ronstadt, Browne and Los Lobos.
The film explodes with rhythm — the pounding feet of zapateado dancers, the strumming of jarana and guitar, the clacking buzz of the quijada, a donkey jawbone. And it swells with soulful voices. It's a journey of pride and self-knowledge with a solid rootsy groove. (This is not Latin-ish "Dorito music," Ronstadt says. "This isMexican music.")
When will this film break your heart? When a young Cenzontle, Sarahi Velazquez, dedicates to Ronstadt a sorrowful song about a lonely orphan in a palm grove, a tune Ronstadt learned from her father, as Ronstadt softly sings along? When you meet the five dazzling Ortega sisters, so bursting with music that their proud dad, a carpenter, says he sometimes has to tell them to knock it off and go to sleep? When two Cenzontles singer-teachers, Fabiola Trujillo and Lucina Rodriguez, harmonize on Woody Guthrie's "Deportee," giving the old song a haunting dimension only immigrant voices can supply? Or when Rodriguez — beside the razor-wired border in Nogales — tells of crossing over as an undocumented girl of 10? Her perilous family journey inspired Browne and Rodriguez to write "The Dreamer," a song that asks: "A dónde van los sueños?" — "Where do the dreams go?"
As Linda and the Mockingbirds powerfully shows, they go to young people, who learn from their elders and add their own spirit and soul, bringing forth new flowers from ancient roots.
Synopsis courtesy of Lawrence Downes
UPCOMING SCREENINGS
More info coming soon!
Linda Ronstadt Documentary ‘Linda and the Mockingbirds’ Acquired by Shout! Studios (EXCLUSIVE)
www.yahoo.com/entertainment/linda-ronstadt-documentary-linda-mockingbirds-181610530.html
Chris Willman
VarietySeptember 4, 2020, 11:16 AM MST
“Linda and the Mockingbirds,” a documentary about Linda Ronstadt making a journey to Mexico to explore her musical roots there, has been picked up for worldwide rights by Shout! Studios, the distribution and production division of the Shout! Factory home video company.
variety.com/t/linda-ronstadt/
variety.com/t/shout-factory/
The film was originally slated to premiere at the Telluride Film Festival over Labor Day weekend. Shout! is promising that the doc will be out later in 2020 via various distribution platforms.
In a follow-up to last year’s Ronstadt documentary “The Sound of My Voice,” “Linda and the Mockingbirds” narrows in on a road trip undertaken by Ronstadt, Jackson Browne and a group of younger musicians made to the Mexican town of Banámichi in the state of Sonora, the birthplace of Ronstadt’s beloved grandfather.
variety.com/t/jackson-browne/
It’s said to deal with border politics, racism and other personal or hot-buttontopics affecting Ronstadt’s and Browne’s companions on the trip: the instructors and students of Los Cenzontles, a school and studio based in San Pablo, California dedicated to the promotion of Mexican roots music.
“Mockingbirds” was directed as well as produced by actor-turned-filmmaker James Keach, who also produced the earlier “Sound of My Voice.”
variety.com/t/james-keach/
“It has been an honor to create a second documentary with Linda Ronstadt, whom I love and admire,” Keach said in a statement. “Crossing the border on this musical journey to Mexico with Linda, Jackson Browne and the young musicians of Los Cenzontles opened the minds and hearts of all of us working on the film. I hope it will open the minds and hearts of everyone who sees it.”
Keach’s other music-doc credits including executive-producing the recent “David Crosby: Remember My Name” and directing and producing 2014’s “Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me.” As a producer he was instrumental in getting the Johnny Cash biopic “Walk the Line” made as well.
In announcing the film, Shout! said that it was at Ronstadt’s request that Keach embarked on making a second film that would focus on her relationship with the Los Cenzontles Cultural Arts Academy. Ronstadt has been known for her associations with Mexican music ever since she interrupted her pop career in 1987 to release “Canciones De Mi Padre,” a labor of love that unexpectedly became a commercial success and was certified double-platinum.
The announcement was made by Shout! founder-CEOs Bob Emmer and Garson Foos. Alex Exline is a producer on the project along with Keach; Nion McEvoy, Alexandra Komisaruk and Michele Farinola are executive producers. Keach’s PCH Films spearheaded the project.
Shout!’s Jeffrey Peisch (who negotiated the deal along with the company’s business affairs VP Steven Katz and the filmmakers’ rep, Julie Dansker) said that “the film beautifully blends multiple stories, focusing on Linda Ronstadt’s Mexican-American roots, celebrating the music and culture of Mexico and offering a passionate and personal story about immigration.”