Documentary Carmine Street Guitars
Following screenings at the world’s most prestigious film festivals – Venice, Toronto, New York and SXSW (Austin, TX) – Carmine Street Guitars opens in Theatres across Canada on April 5th, 2019 with exclusive engagements at TIFF Bell Lightbox, Toronto, The Cinematheque, Vancouver and Cinema du Parc, Montreal.
Ron Mann’s latest feature documentary Carmine Street Guitars is an intimate portrait of the fabled Greenwich Village guitar shop. There, custom guitar maker Rick Kelly and his young apprentice Cindy Hulej build handcrafted guitars out of salvaged wood from historic New York buildings. Nothing looks or sounds quite like a Rick Kelly guitar, which is the reason they are embraced by the likes of Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Patti Smith to name a few.
Ron Mann (Altman, Grass, Comic Book Confidential) is renowned for his genre-bending approach to documentary cinema that explores art forms and contemporary popular culture with vision and verve.
Documentary Carmine Street Guitars
Featuring
Eszter Balint, Christine Bougie (Bahamas), Nels Cline (Wilco), Kirk Douglas (The Roots), Travis Good (The Sadies), Dave Hill, Jaime Hince (The Kills), Stewart Hurwood, Jim Jarmusch (Sqürl), Lenny Kaye (Patti Smith Band), Marc Ribot, Charlie Sexton (Bob Dylan Band).
The Film
Once the centre of the New York bohemia, Greenwich Village is now home to lux restaurants, and buzzer door clothing stores catering to the nouveau riche. But one shop in the heart of the Village remains resilient to the encroaching gentrification: Carmine Street Guitars.
There, custom guitar maker Rick Kelly and his young apprentice Cindy Hulej, build handcrafted guitars out of reclaimed wood from old hotels, bars, churches and other local buildings. Nothing looks or sounds quite like a Rick Kelly guitar, which is the reason they are embraced by the likes of Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Jim Jarmusch, just to name a few.
Featuring a cast of prominent musicians and artists, the film captures five days in the life of Carmine Street Guitars, while examining an all-too-quickly vanishing way of life.
The Trailer
About Rick Kelly
Long Island native Rick Kelly took his fascination toward trees one step further to break boundaries as a guitar builder. Growing up, Kelly had always idolized his grandfather as a woodworker. While in college studying sculpture, Kelly began collecting and working with ancient woods, noticing that the tones they conjured on the electric guitars he was building held deeper, resonant tones than those built on factory assembly lines. He eventually made his way to Greenwich Village where he opened up for business in the late 1970s before moving to the present storefront for Carmine Street Guitars in 1990.
A chance meeting with filmmaker Jim Jarmusch (who gave Kelly some wood from his loft to build him a guitar) led to Kelly’s discovery of New York timber: pine that had been lumbered in the Adirondacks’ virgin forests nearly two centuries ago for the construction of the neighbourhoods of Lower Manhattan, the Village, Bowery, and what would become Soho and Tribeca. Reclaiming these “bones of the city,” Kelly commenced building electric guitars primarily modelled on Leo Fender’s classic Telecaster design.
