Bath Film Festival 2007

Air Guitar Nation

The Air Guitar Championships had been quietly taking place in Finland for some seven years before America woke up to the, um… art form. In 2003 the stakes were raised when Americans embraced the ‘instrument’, and Alexandra Lipsitz was there to record the emergence of a phenomenon. Air Guitar Nation, the film with which we are delighted to kick off this year’s festival, is the result. At the West Coast finals a supreme champ emerges in David ‘C-Diddy’ Jung, while it’s Dan ‘Bjorn Turoque’ Crane who reigns on the East. Meanwhile the Finns are becoming agitated by the prospect of an influx of new blood. Could it be that purity of expression is about to be sacrificed in the name of excess? While much of the film affectionately records the sheer folly of grown men pretending to rock out, there emerges a more sublime sense of something mystical, that in the one minute each contestant has to make a mark each also has an opportunity to connect with something deep and lost. After all - ‘to air is human’! CB

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