After the international success of Kissing Gorbachev and Anti-pop, the Let the Music Play section is back at the Festival dei Popoli: a journey into the music of yesterday, soundtrack of a changing world. 

Among the highlights of the review is Things We Said Today by Andrej Ujica, which took years to make, featuring images of the Beatles' historic performance at New York's Shea Stadium in 1965. The anticipation for an event of absolute magnitude, with the British quartet conquering the United States, is experienced against the backdrop of archive material of unique testimonial value.

We are still in the early 1960s with Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat by Johan Grimonprez: jazz is the backdrop in this historical rollercoaster that rewrites the Cold War episode that led musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach to crash the UN Security Council in protest against the assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. While Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev clapped his shoes in indignation at the UN's complicity in the overthrow of the prime minister, the US State Department swung into action by sending jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong to the Congo to divert attention from the CIA-backed coup.

In the same year, another struggle was taking place in the streets and squares of Spain, as recounted by Pablo Gil Rituerto's Un pueblo que canta no muere: a troupe travels the streets of Spain in the footsteps of the Cantacronache collective's expedition which, at the height of the Franco dictatorship, clandestinely collected the popular songs of the Spanish resistance. Through the prism of oral memory and sound archives, the two journeys intertwine, recounting a territory where the wounds of the dictatorship are still open.

From Italy, finally, comes the world premiere of Going Underground by Lisa Bosi about the Bolognese Gaznevada, active between the late 1970s and the following decade. What other band can better narrate the evolution of Italian music, from punk to Italo disco to house? The band's incredible adventure is a universal story that tells without filters the lives of twenty-year-olds who, between the 1970s and 1980s, pursue their dream of living with music, and end up becoming an Andrea Pazienza comic strip themselves. The group will be present at the festival to introduce the film and hold a DJ set at the end of the screening.