Genghis Blues
Directed by: Roko Belic and Adrian Belic
Documentary | 1999 | 1hr 28min
Tuva (Mongolia), California
www.genghisblues.com

About the film:
The documentary captures the story of blind blues musician Paul Pena. After a brush with fame and success in the 1970s, Pena's fortunes faded as he dealt with career and health problems. While listening to shortwave radio, Pena heard a broadcast of throatsinging, the Tuvan art of manipulating overtones while singing to make higher frequencies more distinguishable, essentially making it possible to sing two notes at once. Pena, over the course of several years, taught himself to throatsing to a very impressive degree. He eventually attended a concert of throatsinging and after the concert impressed one of the throatsingers, Kongar-ool Ondar, who invited him to visit Tuva, a province of Russia, a formerly independent country and the home of throatsinging to sing in the triennial throatsinging festival held there. The entire journey is captured in the documentary, as well as the extraordinary mix of cultures and music. The film won the 1999 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award for a Documentary. It was also nominated for an Academy Award in 2000 in the Best Documentary Feature category.

Screening Times @ Victory Firehouse
9pm Thursday June 17
9pm Friday June 18
7:15pm Saturday June 19

About the filmmakers:

Roko Belic started his filmmaking life in third grade with his brother, Adrian, when a friend of theirs (see Christopher Nolan - "Following" @ Slamdance1999) borrowed a super-8 movie camera from his parents. Heavily influenced by Star Wars, the young team experimented with special effects and the surreality of film. Later, because the knob on his family's single television had broken off (and his mother used a wrench to lock the TV to the local PBS channel), Roko became enchanted with programs through which he could explore the world around him. In 1989 he enrolled at the University of California at Santa Barbara and majored in studio art. He studied Russian, Swahili, and Arabic languages and during the middle of his term he took a year and half hiatus to work and then travel around the world. Having made films throughout his educational career, GENGHIS BLUES is the first of his professional efforts.

Born in America of Czechoslovakian and Yugoslavian parents, Adrian Belic grew up in Chicago, but spent many summers behind the “Iron Curtain” in Eastern Europe with family and friends. This unique cross-cultural upbringing sparked his curiosity about the way people view each other and the world around them. Listening late into the night to captivating stories from remarkable people both in the States and overseas drew him into the art of storytelling. He began making films in elementary school with his childhood friend Christopher Nolan and his brother Roko Belic.

He began making films in elementary school with his childhood friend Christopher Nolan (writer / director Memento, (2001), Insomnia (2002)) and his brother Roko Belic. During their second year of filmmaking (at the age of 8) STAR WARS exploded on the film scene and their once-quaint films grew into 3-minute Super 8 “epics” with ping-pong tables shrouded in cooking flour for planetary stop-action battles, continuing to live-action scenes in the snow-covered backyards of Chicago, all punctuated with fireworks and film frames scratched by hand for “laser” effects. The power of storytelling through motion pictures and sound captivated him.

Adrian graduated from University of Southern California in 1993 with a BS degree in Political Science and a minor in International Relations.

While in college and after college Adrian traveled around the world and across America. He worked with various producers -- co-producing, shooting video and film, recording sound, and story development. He served as the director of an environmental information center in Los Angeles for a year before a childhood fascination with a little known country in Southern Siberia called Tuva resurrected itself.

Adrian and his brother, Roko, formed Wadi Rum Productions in 1995 and embarked on their first production, GENGHIS BLUES, winner of the 1999 Sundance Audience Award, as well as many domestic and international film festival awards, and a 2000 Academy Award Nomination for Best Feature Documentary.

Adrian is currently in post-production on Knightsbridge (working title); a feature documentary shot in Afghanistan and Asia about three Americans who travel to the world’s war zones delivering lifesaving humanitarian aid (www.kbi.org). They are a cross between Mother Teresa and Indiana Jones.

Adrian is a member of the Film Arts Foundation, Francisco Film Society, and the International Documentary Association. He continues to speak and write about filmmaking and following ones passion, as well as teaching and serving on juries at film festivals.

But most of all, he is working on his film.