Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus

Goodbye Horses is a must watch for deep music heads and fans of documentaries on underground and "outsider" arts. Eva Aridjis Fuentes did a fantastic job of capturing Q (Diane Luckey) and her work. Q was a fascinating singer / songwriter who combined hard rock, soul, and new wave in her songs and focused it all through her powerful, sublime voice (think Tina Turner on the Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome soundtrack.) The film follows Diane / Q from her youthful explosion of musical creativity through a series of heartbreaking tribulations and "almost" moments. An equally beautiful and painful paean to dreams and survival.

I watched the movie and I found it amazing. It is excitingly constructed and in no way sensationalist.

I was very moved by how Q's life with all the ups and Downs is shown in the movie.

It is a shame, that all the other music she made through all these years never came out.

In a certain way, it can be compared to Searching for sugar man.

This film is outstanding, mainly because the subject, Q Lazzararus (Diane Luckey) is magnificent. She is a force of nature. There seems to be a serious disconnect in the music industry which doesn't recognize a superior talent like this, and it extends to the indie film industry as well. Those programmers at Sundance and Slamdance and SXSW are all falling over themselves trying to secure the rights to secure the productions of rock royalty and are ignoring the work of a significant underground artist like Q. She is miles above any of the winners at the Grammy Awards this past year, and needs to be awarded a Grammy immediately. Her work is completely misunderstood, since she is a black woman fronting a heavy metal band, and the music industry has no precedent for how to market such a phenomenon.

As far as the documentary is concerned, it is the unbelievable result of the filmmaker, who is a fan of Q herself, getting into a cab driven by none other than Q herself. How is this possible? It sounds like something that would be considered absolutely implausible if it was a script, yet it was real life. If this is not evidence of the abstract phenomenon known as FATE, then please explain how something so amazing could happen.

The documentary is one of the best I have ever seen, and this is written by a documentary teacher, who studies them and presents them to students in major arts colleges, so there is reason to believe that the filmmaker deserves some recognition here. How is it possible that this is not getting worldwide recognition? Oh yeah, because the subject is a black woman who is fronting a heavy metal band. I guess that says it all. Do yourself a favor and see this. Absolutely riveting.

The reason we love films is that, sometimes, they provide us with a reminder that there is magic, still, in the world.

Such is the case with Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus - A remarkable - even miraculous - piece of documentary work by director Eva Aridjis-Fuentes who just happened to be the only person who could have made this film at the particular time it came to be.

This is a stunning, accessible, portrait of an artist as well as a commentary on our society. Heartbreaking, haunting, and, ultimately, uplifting, it's everything you could want from any film and the fact that it's true to life makes it even more important. Watch it at your emotional peril because it is devastating in the end. Bravo!

Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus is a gift to biographical independent cinema and the women's movement plus the cause for diversity and community. It's truly a global music film on top of being a story of one person or many- her family, friends, her colleagues, the director plays a part- oh- It's fresh in my mind but honestly it's such a wild experience which spans the 20th and 21st centuries and there is so much music and pathos packed into it. I would simply say that each part or scene tells a unique story and then all fit together and form a sensible narrative that makes a compelling portrait of someone we just discovered.