Presentation

A musician messes around with his guitar in a bus while the rest of the band sleeps. A singer shows the camera a wrinkled piece of paper with her last written lyrics while she smokes. A Muscovite ragwoman enters a bar in a nondescript Siberian town. A 19-year-old boy fiddles with dozens of wires in a box and makes music with modular synths. An orchestra starts to produce sounds we’ve never heard before.

We never tire of scenes like this. Because they’re scenes that create sequences and stories that enlighten us, that make us smile, that move us. We never tire of our commitment to an increasingly more prolific genre with the increasing ability to tell us more things. Because if there’s anything about music documentaries it’s the amalgam of creators we can find in them, whether in front of or behind the camera. Above all, we never tire of going to watch a film and living and listening to the music inside it.

Yet another year we hope to see you in the cinemas, at the concerts, at the parties, at the Dock dialogues. We’ll be waiting for you in Perfect Day, with the year’s most interesting and prizewinning documentaries, in Paint it Black, in New Publics, in the Festival Dialogues and in Dock Live, a section we’re repeating with films and live music resulting in the creation of fleeting, one-off pieces you’ll never hear again.

2020 will be our thirteenth edition. A new edition seeking yet another year to bring the city new ways of telling music and new music to change the way stories are told. An edition which will yet another year draw a smile from you, move you, surprise you. As if an orchestra were to suddenly start playing by your side, producing sounds you’d never heard before.

Welcome to Dock of the Bay.