A list of musical films

Music elates, touches the soul and bypasses reason. Music is magic. But precisely this magic can turn it into an insidious weapon for music and violence belong together. The brutal power of African war dances, the ferocity of Maori Hakas, the earth-shattering roar of US sound guns blasting Metallica at Taliban hideouts the principle is always the same: Aggressive sounds demoralise the enemy and whip the allies into a frenzy. In Songs of War, director Tristan Chytroschek explores the extraordinary harmony between music and violence. Sesame Street composer, Christopher Cerf, always wanted his music to be fun and entertaining. But then he learned that his songs had been used to torture prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. He is stunned by this abuse of his work and wants to find out how this could happen. Cerf embarks on a journey to learn what makes music such a powerful stimulant. In the process, he speaks to soldiers, psychologists and prisoners tortured with his music at Guantanamo and find out how the military has been employing music as a potent weapon for hundreds of years.

Lost on a mysterious island where aging and time have come unglued, Wendy must fight to save her family, her freedom, and the joyous spirit of youth from the deadly peril of growing up.

A group of mourners and a man spat from the depths of Hades build a boat from the debris of New Orleans to rescue their lost loved ones trapped beneath the sea.

Two school kids, who are best friends, are drinking on the side of a river. One friend bets the other that he can't swim across the river and "Reach The Rock". The friend takes the bet and drowns halfway towards the rock. The entire town blames the kid for his friends death, he runs away, never to be seen again. He eventually comes back to his home town of Shermerville and goes crazy, and starts to trash the town (for example, breaking store-front windows, stealing a police car). He also meets up with his old high school girlfriend.

'Parallel Planes' is a documentary film portraying 12 American avant-garde & punk-rock musicians. It is a journey between genres, an essay on free thinking and an intimate look at how 12 critical players relate to the potential of music.

The remarkable story of The Weather Underground, radical activists of the 1970s, and of radical politics at its best and most disastrous.

The true story of a man who built a house to heal his wife.

In 2007, 11 years after one of the most influential American punk bands, Jawbreaker, called it quits the three members reconnected in a San Francisco recording studio. Follow the band as they retell their "rags to riches to rags" story.

In April 1986, the city of Chernobyl in the Soviet Union suffers one of the worst nuclear disasters in the history of mankind. Consequently, many heroes put their lives on the line in the following days, weeks and months.

A nightmare chase through hell in a never-ending, unrequited daisy chain of desire...

From radical turntablism (Otomo Yoshihide) to laptop music innovation (Numb), via classic instrument hijacking (Sakamoto Hiromichi), Tokyo's avant-garde music scene is internationally known for its boldness.

A gang in a Volvo have staked out a flat; when its occupants leave to walk their dog, the six break into the place. One keeps his eyes on a stopwatch: they have only ten minutes before the couple returns. Instead of stealing things, the gang goes from room to room making fascinating percussive music with found objects: first in the kitchen, then the bedroom, the bathroom, and the salon. Cabinet doors, pot lids, light switches, a pill dispenser, a lamp, books, and a vacuum cleaner hose all add to the suite in four movements. The drummers keep the first three rooms tidy, but what will the flat's occupants make of the hurricane that hits the living room?

The world's first documentary about Siberia's punk rock scene in the 1980s. It was a phenomenon of those times that this music existed thousands of miles away from the movement's epicentres in New York and London.

A documentary spanning over 30 years of the California Bay Area's punk music history with a central focus on the emergence of Berkeley's inspiring 924 Gilman Street music collective.

This documentary pictures a globally interconnected and political music scene, built on autonomy and solidarity, which has declared war on capitalism and the mainstream culture. Whether it s squatters in Barcelona, antifascists in Moscow, inhabitants of self-governed trailer parks or activists of the CRASS collective - they can all be brought down to one common denominator: their protest and music as means and tool to express it. In an authentic and complex contemporary document, the film makers tell about members of this scene - their motivations, shared aspirations and ideas of utopia and how they create a parallel universe that functions under its own rules.

A girl is caught between the life that took her brother and her own inability to strike out on her own. In her grief, she finds solace in the dark music of Black Metal and dreams of becoming a rock star.

A tone-deaf cop works to track down a group of guerilla percussionists whose anarchic public performances are terrorizing the city.

Faced with both her hot-tempered father's fading health and melting ice-caps that flood her ramshackle bayou community and unleash ancient aurochs, six-year-old Hushpuppy must learn the ways of courage and love.

A man in search for the creation of utopia in the present. First, as a member of a commune on an Estonian island, then alone in the majestic wilderness of Northern Finland and later as the singer of a neo-pagan, black metal band in Norway.

A headstrong young woman returns to New Orleans after the death of her estranged mother.

On the representation of work, or how class struggle emerges again.

A collection of expertly photographed phenomena with no conventional plot. The footage focuses on the relationship between nature, humanity, and technology.