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Alan Zweig’s cult favourite mines the comedy and tragedy of obsessive record collecting, assembling an all-star lineup of audiophiles, store clerks, DJs, Elvis fanatics and hot jazz enthusiasts. There’s the guy with half a million records crammed into his two-bedroom apartment, the guy who’s memorized the playlist to every K-tel record ever made, and the guy who spent four years cleaning and playing every single record in his collection in alphabetical order. But it’s quickly obvious these unforgettable characters are driven by more than just a passion for LPs, EPs, 78s and 45s. Zweig’s astute use of mirror confessionals throughout the film spins music appreciation into profound admissions about love, longing, compulsion and futility. Vinyl is a smart and self-reflexive tribute to the analog format that recognizes the record as an object beyond music, collecting as a way of being and the collector as the ultimate seeker. Angie Driscoll

Doug Jones, Associate Director of Programming, Los Angeles Film Festival “Ten years after originally seeing Vinyl, I still marvel at Alan Zweig’s candor and emotional honesty as he turns the camera on himself and questions the life choices that lie behind his own record collection in this unforgettable portrait of self-doubt.”

Media Coverage

• torontoist Feature