Now available on iTunes, Amazon and DVD. Check out the Musicwood store to own and rent your own copy of the film: http://musicwoodthefilm.com/store Musicwood is a New York Time Critics' Pick: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/01/movies/musicwood-looks-at-a-threat-to-instrument-makers.html Like our Facebook page http://facebook.com/Musicwoodthefilm and check us out on Twitter, @MusicwoodDoc Musicwood is an adventure-filled journey, a political thriller with music at its heart. It is a journey that follows an unusual band of world-renowned guitar-makers — Chris Martin, Bob Taylor and Dave Berryman of Gibson — to the primeval Tongass forest. These guitar-makers are on a desperate mission: to negotiate with Native Americans and change the way a rare rain forest is logged before it’s too late for acoustic guitars. The film begins with the startling revelation that Native American corporations are clear-cutting vast acres of primeval forest. They are logging the largest coastal temperate rainforest in the world and the largest reserve of old growth trees in the USA. If logging doesn’t change, they will run out of the large Sitka Spruce trees used in guitars in less than 10 years time. These Native Americans who’ve notoriously been given a raw deal from the US government are distrustful of the white man telling them what to do. Enter Greenpeace, a radical environmental group, and soon all are battling over a forest that is the last of its kind on the planet. Musicwood upends our simplistic view of indigenous peoples and the past, with a story where it’s often impossible to tell the good guys from the bad. Musicwood is a culture clash of staggering proportions, between Native American loggers, white CEO’s, and the most radical environmental group in the world. The film features exclusive acoustic performances and interviews with guitar players like acoustic virtuoso Kaki King, The Antlers, Yo La Tengo, Steve Earle, Turin Brakes, and Kurt Wagner of Lambchop. Musicwood is a funny, complex and heartbreaking tug-of-war over natural resources and a profound cultural conflict.
, plenty of the films — documentaries and features alike — screening at this year's Nashville Film Festival are music-related in one way or another. One doc we haven't yet mentioned, however, is Musicwood, which screens tonight at 7 p.m. and tomorrow at 2 p.m., with a Q&A featuring the director and the producer to follow. Tickets are available
here.
Now, when most newspaper-reading types hear the words "Gibson Guitars" and "wood" in tandem, they most likely think of the two occasions when the Nashville-based company was raided by agents of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service — the raids took place because Gibson violated the Lacey Act by illegally importing exotic wood, with the instrument makers ultimately losing roughly $600,000 in penalties and forfeited assets. But that actually isn't what Musicwood is about at all, it would seem. Rather, it's about the point of intersection between representatives from three guitar companies (Gibson, Martin and Taylor), a Native-American logging company, Greenpeace, and some musicians: that point of intersection being Southeast Alaska. Here's a synopsis:
