Movies: Folk music

Celebrating the finest in Irish folk music with a compilation of performances taken from the BBC archives. Highlights include songs from The Clancy Brothers, The Chieftains, Christy Moore, The Pogues and Sharon Shannon....

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A square rich boy wants to make it with a pretty folk singer, so he buys the coffee house where she and a bunch of other beatniks perform. Features performances by The Goldebriars, The Free Wheelers, and a very young Joan Rivers doing a stand-up rout...

Two storytellers put forth their versions of the story of Shravan Kumar. The art for the film uses painted images from a wooden portable shrine called a Kaavad. The film is a collaborative work between traditional Kaavad storytellers and Kaavad artis...

After having an abrupt falling out with his childhood friend and bandmate, William, Ben Aiken must contend with the idea of striking out on his own, making amends with his friend, or giving up on his dreams altogether....

Stompin' Tom performs live at the Horseshoe Tavern on Queen St. in Toronto....

Through concerts and interviews, folk-progressive group Harmonium takes Quebec culture to California. This documentary full of colour and sound, filmed in California in 1978, recounts the ups and downs of the journey of the Quebec musical group Harm...

This special celebrates the harmonious pop-rock group, blending full-performance clips, rare home movies and exclusive interviews with the members....

A dazzling display of abstracted images....

How the Fiddle Flows follows Canada's great rivers west along the fur-trading route of the early Europeans. The newcomers introduced the fiddle to the Aboriginal people they intermarried with along the way. A generation later, their mixed-blood offsp...

As a sci-fi obsessed woman living in near isolation, Beverly Glenn-Copeland wrote and self-released Keyboard Fantasies in Huntsville, Ontario back in 1986. Recorded in an Atari-powered home-studio, the cassette featured seven tracks of a curious folk...

Life-worn Charlie struggles with leaving his present life and family in Ohio to return to his childhood Kentucky home and the music and lifestyle that once defined him. But first he must pass his musical heritage on to his grand-kids....

Joni Mitchell has been called the queen of folk music and one of the biggest pop stars of the 60s and 70s. Even today, her lyrics and unique guitar style continue to inspire new generations of singers and songwriters....

While flying to the first stop on their latest tour, the four members of the Australian music group The Seekers recall in flashback the origins of the group and their rise to success....

A portrait of the Chicago Near-North nightlife scene in the mid-1960s, centering around the struggles and romantic desires of an African American singer played by long-forgotten folk sensation Willie Wright. (Courtesy Chicago Film Archives)...

Man of the people, taxi driver, Jean Carignan is above all else one of the world's greatest violinists. In his hands reels become complex, intelligent creations, played with a virtuosity worthy of Paganni, and which continue the traditions of a genre...

The 'At The Roadhouse' concert film follows intimate performances and sequences by The Paper Kites, where in July 2022, the band arrived in the small regional Victoria town of Campbells Creek (140km north-east of Melbourne, Australia) to transform an...

A tribute film on Bob Dylan, depicting Calcutta's affinity with Dylan through cityscape and interviews of notable Indian musicians who were inspired by him. The film also draws parallels between Dylan's body of work and the Baul tradition of Bengal....

Norwegian musician Ole Paus turns 70 years old and is celebrated by a long line of artist friends who sing his songs in the Oslo Opera House in Norway....

A poetic film about ancient Lithuanian traditions and rituals....