Richard Gray 🍿’s review published on Letterboxd:
SXSW #11
Every year, my partner and I have a tradition of seeing at least one music documentary together at a major festival. This year, we've been lucky to catch a few together already - Tina, Poly Styrene:I Am a Cliche, The Sparks Brothers to name a few - and each has revealed something previous unexplored in music history. The same was true of Gracie Otto's portrait of George Martin's Air studio in Montserrat, where a who's who of talent went to chill and lay down records. While I knew very little about this period of Martin's career (I mostly followed the Beatles stuff), and there was an impressive amount of talking heads, I'm not entirely sure there was enough material here to sustain even this slender feature. It's also interesting that of the two Australian films at SXSW this year, one is a fiercely feminist film about decolonising history and the other is a slice of music history that is the very definition of colonialism.