Stones, James Brown and Blur in Music Doc Fest

As the 35MM movie theater continues its seemingly endless run of film festivals, Moscow kinophiles will get a chance this weekend to explore a range of music documentaries whose subjects run the gamut from the rise of Islamic punk rock to the brooding genre of British dubstep. The Beat Film Festival, which opened on Thursday night with the Russian premiere of the new Rolling Stones documentary “Stones in Exile,” about the making of the band's classic 1972 album "Exile on Main Street," runs all weekend and spills over into next week, ending on Tuesday, June 8.

In fact, all the films being shown at the festival are making their first appearance in Russia, a feat that took some serious legwork, Beat organizer Kirill Sorokin said.

“The only — albeit the main — difficulty I ran into was that some of these films, for example, the one about dubstep, ‘Bassweight,’ belong strictly to the filmmakers,” Sorokin explained. “[The filmmakers] don’t have distributors, agents, and some of them don’t even have secretaries. So it sometimes took a really long time to hunt them down, before we could both agree on bringing their films here.”

But all that hunting should be worth it. Sorokin has assembled an incredibly diverse schedule, one that combines some of rock music’s most iconic figures with some of the world’s most marginalized genres.

"Favela on Blast,” directed by American DJ and producer Diplo, who is also in Moscow this weekend for a gig at Gazgolder, is a snapshot of the baile-funk scene in Brazil, a sweaty combination of electro-house and indigenous Brazilian rhythms that comes from the enormous slums, or favelas, around the country’s metropolitan centers. “No Distance Left to Run” is a portrait of British pop group Blur, which rose to fame leading the wave of britpop in the 1990s and recently reunited to play several festival gigs.

“Soul Power” documents a 1974 music festival in Zaire — organized alongside the famous “Rumble in the Jungle,” a boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman — that featured James Brown, B.B. King, The Spinners and Miriam Makeba. And, “Taqwacore: The Rise of Islamic Punk” brings a surprising combination of aesthetics to the screen — the raw, do-it-yourself ethics of punk rock and the strict laws of Islam — in a way that illustrates their similarities.

“My task was not just to stuff the program with as many new films as possible but to make out of them a festival that would reflect all the possible margins of music,” Sorokin said. “And I really don’t like the term ‘rockumentary,’ simply because in my eyes, it really hurts the documentary genre and is just a tool used to increase DVD sales."