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Written and directed by Wim Wenders
Director Wim Wenders (Buena Vista Social Club; Wings
of Desire; Paris, Texas ) explores the lives of
his favorite blues artists Skip James, Blind Willie Johnson, and J. B. Lenoir
in a film that is part history and part personal pilgrimage. The film tells the
story of these artists' lives in music through a fictional film-within-a-film, rare
archival footage, and covers of their songs by contemporary musicians, including
Bonnie Raitt, Lucinda Williams, Lou Reed, Eagle Eye Cherry, Nick Cave and The Bad
Seeds, The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Cassandra Wilson, Garland Jeffreys, Los Lobos,
and others.
Says Wenders: "These songs meant the world to me. I felt there was
more truth in them than in any book I had read about America, or in any movie I had
ever seen. I've tried to describe, more like a poem than in a 'documentary,' what
moved me so much in their songs and voices."
Performances in The Soul of a Man
T-Bone Burnett
Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds
Eagle-Eye Cherry
Shemekia Copeland
The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
Alvin Youngblood Hart
Skip James *
Garland Jeffreys
Chris Thomas King
J.B. Lenoir *
Los Lobos
John Mayall *
Bonnie Raitt
Lou Reed
Vernon Reid
Marc Ribot
James "Blood" Ulmer
Lucinda Williams
Cassandra Wilson
*indicates archival performance
Cast:
Skip James: Keith B. Brown
Blind Willie Johnson: Chris Thomas King
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