Today the Sundance Institute announced the films debuting at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival in January of 2011. Actor and director Michael Rapaport will have films in competition as an actor (“Big Fan”) and also as a director for the A Tribe Called Quest documentary “Beats, Rhymes and Fights.”
In addition to contributions from fellow Queens native, Nas, Madlib composed an original score for the film and Stone’s Throw’s Peanut Butter Wolf supervised all of the documentary’s music. Rapaport, who has appeared in dozens of films in the last two decades, reportedly traveled with Q-Tip, Phife Dawg, Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Jerobi to collect over 200 hours of footage over the past two years.
While there are 15 other projects vying for the title of “Best U.S. Documentary,” the Harry Belafonte film, “Sing Your Song” and the James Taylor and Carole King documentary, “Troubadours” are the only other entries in the competition focused on musicians. An extended trailer was released earlier this week, while the full-length documentary is expected to be released some time in 2011. More information about “Beats Rhymes and Fights” is available at the movie’s official site.
