ZIA Records Participating in National Record Store Day Film Fest at MADCAP Theaters

ZIA Records Participating in National Record Store Day Film Fest

MADCAP Theatres in Tempe, the home of Midnite Movie Mamacita, works

with ZIA Records to present 3 nights of Indie films, David Lynch Films

(Phoenix, AZ) – Building on the phenomenal success of National Record Store Day in promoting independent record stores as not just places to buy CDs but also as the nexus of any given city’s music community, ZIA Records hopes to do the same for local indie film communities by participating in the first ever National Record Store Day Film Fest, taking place September 24-26 at MADCAP Theatre on Mill Avenue in Tempe.

In much the same way Metallica helped to promote the first National Record Store Day in April 2008 by performing live in a San Francisco record shop, renowned independent filmmaker David Lynch is supporting the first National Record Store Day Film Fest by personally designing the event’s promotional poster. Two of Lynch’s films will also be shown on the festival’s first night.

The first film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), is a “prequel” to Lynch’s wildly popular and idiosyncratic television series of the early 90’s, Twin Peaks, and centers around the final week in the life of Laura Palmer, a teenager whose mysterious murder was the focal point of the original series. Also shown that evening will be Lynch’s 1986 film Blue Velvet, a strange and darkly compelling take on suburban American life featuring one of actor Dennis Hopper’s greatest performances on film.

Music documentaries comprise the festival’s second day, September 25th, with back-to-back screenings of Anvil: The Story of Anvil and Nerdcore Rising. The first is about an aging Canadian heavy metal band whose 1982 album “Metal on Metal” inspired subsequent headbanger bands such as Metallica, Motörhead and Guns N’ Roses, but who never achieved the same level of fame and success as those bands who cite Anvil as early influences. This film about their sometimes hilarious, sometimes tragic last-ditch attempt at fame has played to wide critical acclaim. The second film chronicles a music sub-genre known as “nerdcore,” essentially hip-hop music set to lyrics about subjects of interest to “geeks” – Star Wars movies, Dungeons & Dragons and computers, to name only a few – and follows MC Frontalot, the “godfather of nerdcore,’ on his first national tour.

The festival’s final day features two “Tokyo Shock” films, or gory Japanese slasher movies. While the films, Versus and Ichi the Killer, do have actual plots, the point of these films is to push the limits of big-screen gore through the portrayal of over-the-top, almost cartoon-like violence, flying entrails, splattering body parts and unmatched sadism. While not for everyone, these sorts of films do enjoy a certain degree of popularity among indie film lovers who appreciate the cinematic techniques used to portray such horrific, fictional violence.

The National Record Store Film Fest Day gets an added boost in Phoenix with its host, the Midnite Movie Mamacita (a.k.a. Andrea Beesley-Brown, info at www.midnitemoviemamacita.net), known locally as “the Valley’s Diva of Double-Features.” ZIA is also marking the event with an incredible one-week-only DVD sale on selected titles beginning September 21, including Blu-rays, entire seasons of hit cable TV series such as “Weeds,” the huge AMC breakout hit “Mad Men,” and “Dexter,” about a serial killer who only kills those who richly deserve it, and new releases such as I Love You Man, Obsessed and Last House on the Left.

ZIA Records operates eight independent retail stores in the southwest offering new and used CDs, DVDs and video games, with four of those stores in the greater Phoenix area. For more information about the inaugural National Record Store Day Film Fest visit www.ziarecords.com/filmfest. Tickets for the Phoenix events are available at all ZIA Records Valley locations.