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Sundance kicks off - Passing Strange, a Doors movie, Mellisa Auf der Maur, free downloads, Adele & more

Sundance

“Modern day renaissance woman Melissa Auf der Maur will be screening Out Of Our Minds, her short film in collaboration with filmmaker Tony Stone, at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Auf der Maur, whose impressive résumé includes stints as the bass player for Hole and Smashing Pumpkins, is a celebrated solo musician and an accomplished photographer whose work has appeared in exhibitions and publications worldwide.

Out Of Our Minds is a multimedia concept album three years in the making which incorporates an album, film, comic and website – all to be unveiled in full later this year. The film portion of this impressive body of work was accepted to the Sundance Film Festival as part of the New Frontier Program.

Three time periods, one connection: Blood. The central characters are a woman (Melissa Auf der Maur) and her car. The 28-minute film follows her in a strange ritual that climaxes in a collision between past and future, crashing through the gateway to parallel worlds in the same forest. A fantasy world where a Viking heart, a car crash and a bleeding forest connect. Using music rather than dialogue, the film tells a universal tale in striking optics. Borrowed from mythology, the Hunt for the Heart is the eternal quest envisioned in Out Of Our Minds. Conceived by musician Melissa Auf der Maur and birthed by Filmmaker Tony Stone (Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America) this mini epic is proudly self-produced and shot in HD fuelled by solar power.

You can watch the trailer HERE.

The Sundance Film Festival runs from January 15 – 25, 2009 in Park City, Utah.

In a partnership with Apple’s iTunes Music Store, Sundance and Shorts International have announced today that they will make available 10 short films selected to screen during the film festival as free (yup, free) downloads via their online media store (available in the US, UK and Canada only). The offer will only be available starting today through January 25, so film geeks should act now. [MTV]

The Salt Lake City Tribune has a list of music events going on during the festival including the daily ASCAP Music Cafe featuring performances by people like Damien Rice and Birdmonster, an Adele concert, and more.

Salt Lake Weekly says, “Two of the potentially biggest films in this year’s festival are about music: the first-ever documentary about The Doors, When You’re Strange, and Spike Lee‘s film version of Stew’s Tony Award-winning musical Passing Strange. The role of music in film gets examined, as music publishing organization BMI is sponsoring a roundtable discussion Jan. 21 on “Music and Film: the Creative Process” with names like George Clinton and Duncan Sheik scheduled to partake.”, and “Some of the biggest acts outside the auspices of the Sundance fest, at least in the hip-hop universe, are at Harry O’s, considered by many to be the hip place to hang on Main Street, with top acts like Nelly and T.I. appearing.”