LI Music and Entertainment Hall sets doc lineup on Billy Joel, more

It’s rock doc time again at the Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame, which on Tuesday posted the full lineup for its second annual Music Documentary Film Festival, which will include the previously announced screening of a rare interview with Billy Joel.

Passes and tickets for the Stony Brook museum's event, which runs Sept. 25-27, can be purchased at limusichalloffame.org.

This year’s festival has almost doubled in size with 43 features and shorts, requiring the Hall of Fame to add a second screen. The titles come from 10 countries and include a number of regional, national or world premieres. Filmmakers will be on hand to speak at screenings, and each of the three days will wrap up with parties accessible to VIP pass holders. 

All of which makes this niche festival one of the largest of its kind in the United States even after just one year in operation, according to Tom Needham, the Hall of Fame’s vice chair. Sight Unseen, a similar fest founded in 1999, reportedly screened eight titles this year. So did the FILMUSIC Festival on Martha’s Vineyard, according to its website. The U.K.-based Doc’ n Roll Festival screened 12 features when it arrived in New York City in April.

"We’re really America’s premier music documentary film festival, if you can believe it," Needham said.

The festival opens with "Kenny Loggins: Conviction of the Heart" and includes films about Ann Wilson of Heart, the keyboardist Billy Preston and record producer Peter Asher. One of the hottest tickets at the festival may be the world premiere of "1971: Billy Joel’s Lost Interview," in which the newly discovered audio of a very young Joel is put in the mouth of his AI-generated avatar. (Joel did not participate in the film.) There are also features on such popular overseas artists as the Spanish rocker Leiva and the Brazilian genre-straddler Alceu Valença.

Other subjects come from well outside the rock arena. "The Rose: Come Back to Me" follows a K-pop band trying to stage a comeback, "Paquito D’Rivera: From Carne y Frijol to Carnegie Hall," tells the Cuban clarinetist’s life story and "The Long Island Underground Legends of Hip-Hop" features members of Islip Town pioneers JVC Force ("Strong Island"). Not quite fitting into any category, perhaps, is "Whistle," a 75-minute Australian film that follows several contestants in the Masters of Musical Whistling competition.

"We’d like fans to discover some artists that maybe they haven’t previously," Needham said, adding: "They’re all really good, strong movies. I think if you take a chance and see something that you weren’t expecting to see, you’ll be pleasantly surprised."

By Rafer Guzmán

rafer.guzman@newsday.com