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Some 27 shorts and full-lengths movies at the Sundance Film Festival have musical themes. Here's a handful that have gathered advance notice:
"Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest": Directed by Michael Rapaport, the film follows the rise of the innovative hip-hop collective known as A Tribe Called Quest.
"Fight For Your Right Revisited": A short featuring actors Elijah Wood, Seth Rogen, Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly and Jack Black, picks up a thread from where the Beastie Boys left off in the 1986 video "(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!)." Written and directed by Beastie Boy Adam Yauch.
"Red Shirley": Musician Lou Reed sat down with his 100-year-old cousin, Shirley, and filmed a portrait of her, an activist and unionist. Directed by Reed, with photography by Ralph Gibson.
"Sing Your Song": A portrait of Harry Belafonte, focusing on the entertainer's contribution to the civil-rights movement, as well as his music-world success as the first African American to win an Emmy. Directed by Susanne Rostock.
"Troubadours": Director Morgan Neville profiles the lives of singer-songwriters James Taylor and Carole King, and the California music scene based around the Los Angeles Troubadour Club in the late 1960s and '70s.
"!Women Art Revolution / U.S.A.": Lynn Hershman Leeson's documentary about the late 20th-century art movement by female artists protesting sexism and racial exclusion, with an original score by Carrie Brownstein, formerly of the indie rock band Sleater-Kinney.
"The Music Never Stopped": The festival's Salt Lake City premiere is about Gabriel, a man with a brain tumor estranged from his parents (Lou Taylor Pucci), who reconnects with the world after a music therapist (Julia Ormond) employs the music of the Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan, which he loved as a teenager. This fictional story, in Jim Kohlberg's directorial debut, is based on an Oliver Sacks case study, "The Last Hippie."
– Compiled by David Burger, The Salt Lake Tribune