Movie music — New, different film festival debuts Monday

A new music festival makes its debut Monday — the Park City Film Music Festival, designed to showcase independent movies but with a focus on the impact music has on cinema.

The new festival is the brainchild of Leslie Harlow, founder and, together with husband Russell Harlow, co-director of Utah's longest running summer chamber-music event, the Park City International Music Festival.

The new film-music festival is the first of its kind in the United States, according to Leslie Harlow. "There is one in Belgium (the Flanders International Film Festival), which is huge. Last year it drew 88,000 people. We're aiming for that with ours, but we're starting small."

During the nearly weeklong event, 32 films in three genres — short film, feature-length and documentary — will be screened at the Canyons Resort, which will act as the festival headquarters. "We're showing 11 short films of 35 minutes or less, 15 full-length films, four documentaries and two short music-performance films," Harlow said.

The shorts will be shown in groups of four to six films, and each film or group of shorts will be screened at least twice during the festival. Showings begin at either 8 or 8:30 a.m. each day, with the last film starting at 10 p.m. Films run back to back, with only a short break in between.

Harlow said that all of the films were chosen either because of the high quality of the music or because of the intrinsic nature of their musical scores. The films themselves range widely in content. "Several deal with controversial subjects, but there are also many family-oriented films as well."

Tuesday's offerings are all geared toward family audiences, and some of Harlow's personal favorites will be shown that day. "Among the documentaries, I'm really excited about 'Music From the Edge of Time: Los Zafiros,' " she said. "The film is about a legendary pop-music group from Cuba called Los Zafiros, The Sapphires. They were the No. 1 pop group in Cuba, about as big as The Beatles. A son of one of the group's members made this film, and it's really great."

Some of the other films that Harlow feels will be festival hits include the features "Genius," about a young artist; "Swing!" with a cast that includes Jonathan Winters, Barry Bostwick, Jacqueline Bisset and Nell Carter; and "Abby Singer," about a casting director who loses his girlfriend at the Sundance Film Festival.

" 'Abby Singer' is one of the best films at the festival," Harlow said. "It was made entirely in Utah on practically zero budget, and it has a ton of cameos from Sundance."