Today it was announced that Memphis director Robert Gordon’s newest film Newport & The Great Folk Dream will be featured in the renowned Venice International Film Festival as part of the Venice Biennale 2025 on Friday, September 5th. The Venice International Film Festival is the oldest film festival in the world — this will be its 82nd edition — and considered one of the “Big Five” festivals, along with Cannes, Berlin, Sundance, and Toronto. Gordon produced the film along with Historic Films Archive owner Joe Lauro and Memphis filmmaker Laura Jean Hocking, who also edited the film. The team has been working on the project off and on for eight years.
Indeed, it was a herculean task to sort through the 80 hours of footage that Gordon et al. had access to, shot by filmmaker Murray Lerner and his crew at the Newport Folk Festivals between 1963 and 1966. While some of that footage became the basis for the film Festival (1967), and Bob Dylan’s Newport appearances in those years have been documented elsewhere, Gordon delved much deeper into the trove of never-before-seen film, unearthing vivid, beautifully shot performances by Johnny Cash, Howlin’ Wolf, the Staple Singers, Joan Baez, Dave Van Ronk, The Chambers Brothers, Sleepy John Estes, Pete Seeger, and many more.
One of the film’s revelations, in fact, is the incredible diversity on hand at Newport from the very start. International performers of all stripes were sprinkled among more typical folk fare, as were many long-forgotten blues artists who’d first appeared on old ’78s. Newport, it’s now clear, helped spur on the blues revival of the ’60s. Along with film footage, Newport & The Great Folk Dream features new audio unearthed is from The Blues House, where blues performers like Sun House, Elizabeth Cotten, Mississippi John Hurt, and John Lee Hooker lived were put up during the weekend of the festival. The jam sessions from those recordings alone are pure musical gold.
The film, which was co-produced by Stephanie Jenkins and Kim Bledsoe Lloyd, also illuminates the connection between the Civil Rights movement and the folk music scene. One active presence from the beginning was the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), as was their performing ensemble, the Freedom Singers. In fact, among the film’s most powerful scenes shows festival goers marching for civil rights in the streets of Newport in July, 1963, an intentional rehearsal for the following month’s March on Washington.
The politics and ideals of the fomenting counterculture of the time are omnipresent here. In a statement announcing the premiere, the filmakers said:
Powerful music leaps from the air and can change the actual world. At the Newport Folk Festivals in the early 1960s, the molecules were electric with rebellion and democracy, with anger and hope. Musicians drove that change—Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Pete Seeger but also banjo players from coal country, remote Georgia gospel artists, rural Canadian fishermen, and the opportunities created for the urban kids to mingle with those they’d not ordinarily encounter. Newport & the Great Folk Dream sizzles with the energy of youth and promise.
Oh yes, Bob Dylan. While his evolution over each successive festival leading up to his 1965 electric epiphany is well-documented, and may help the documentary win abundant viewers whose curiosity was piqued by the Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, this film makes it clear that he was but one drop in the festival’s swirling bucket of musical inspiration — albeit a charismatic one.
Today, when Rolling Stone broke the news of the film’s premiere, Gordon expounded on how Newport & The Great Folk Dream relates to the Dylan biopic, saying, “I have to praise Timothée Chalamet and James Mangold for expanding our audience tremendously. A year ago, my friends’ kids weren’t really interested in Newport, and now they know all about it.”