Film about Wichita music legend Rudy Love will be available to stream for 48 hours
If you missed the chance to see “This is Love” — the Wichita-produced, award-winning documentary about local music legend Rudy Love — in a theater before the coronavirus pandemic started, you still have another chance.
Over the Fourth of July weekend, the film will be available to rent via streaming service Vimeo, but it will only be up for 48 hours — starting at noon on Friday and ending at noon on Sunday.
The film, the brainchild of local filmmaker Shawn Rhodes, details the life of Love, a local singer/songwriter who over his long career has written songs for Little Richard and Ray Charles, among others, but still never managed to break into the mainstream.
Rhodes spent 15 years recording interviews for the film, which runs for an hour and 20 minutes and includes sit-downs with well-known stars like Sinbad, Mick Fleetwood, George Clinton and Norman Jay MBE.
The film, since its U.S. debut at Wichita’s Tallgrass Film Festival in October 2018, has won many film festival awards, including Raindance’s Spirit Award in London, the prize for Best International Documentary in Rome, and a nomination in the Oscar-qualifying Krakow Film Festival’s DocFilmMusic Competition.
It was scheduled to screen at museums and universities across the country, but those showings have all been put on hold because of the coronavirus pandemic, said John Alexander, another of the filmmakers who worked on the project.
The 48-hour streaming will directly benefit the Love family in Wichita and will serve as a replacement to those missed screenings, Alexander said.
“This is to keep the momentum going during these times and bring ‘This is Love’ into people’s living rooms,” he said.
It will cost $9.99 to stream the film, but people won’t need a subscription to Vimeo, Alexander said. It can be found at this link starting on Friday: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/thisislove.
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