:: Documentary ::: Suspended Dreams: The Unknown Musicians

If you take away the teen idols and divas, punk rock rip-offs and one-hit wonders you are left with a much less celebrated group of protagonists. They’re a collection of street musicians, buskers, virtuosos, drifters and one-man bands, forgotten, then disregarded.

They come to city streets in search of an audience - mostly walls and pigeons and blurs of people in passing as sound waves bounce in a seemingly perpetual echo, never fully absorbed by anything or anyone. One song melds into the next in an attempt to protect both artist and bystander from an uncomfortable silence or an awkward applause given in pity.

A lone listener leans against a building. A sequence of notes, a fluctuation of voice, a medley of verse and rhyme come together like a wave building strength, breaking the surface, curling and crashing, triggering a cascade of emotion and memory and revelation, and for a brief moment the two are connected in a higher form of communion, soul speaking to soul, a harmonious empathy. And that single moment nullifies the plethora of apathy, for that connection, albeit shared but with one, justifies every effort and sacrifice, and is the essence of art.