Back in 2015, a group of ambitious people in the small Italian town of Cesena, population just under one hundred thousand people, had a dream. Get the legendary rock band Foo Fighters to play a concert for them. They figured the best way to get their attention was to gather one thousand musicians to play a song by the band and hope they go viral.
It was the brainchild of Fabio Zaffagnini, who figured that with two hundred fifty singers, two hundred fifty drummers, three hundred fifty guitarists and one hundred fifty bass players would be sufficient to play the 1999 song Learn to Fly from the Foo Fighters album There Is Nothing Left to Lose. The idea sounds somewhat simple enough, sure you need to find one thousand musicians who can play rock music and you need to spend some money on marketing and set up equipment for the day, but that’s all right?
As the core group starts to organize and has a successful Kickstarter to help launch things, they start running into concerns. Sound travels at 343 m/s, which normally isn’t any kind of problem for bands on a tiny stage, but when you have two hundred fifty drummers all spaced out, that can mess with timing. The person they are renting gear from worries they won’t have enough microphones as well. A system was devised to convert a metronome from a sound to lights to keep everyone on task.
Then on the day of the event when everyone actually shows up, how will they all play together as so many drums banging away can easily just turn into a headache inducing mess. When you get more than literally one guitar player in a room together they often turn into one upmanship divas, and bass players never like to be at the forefront. The first test run of the drum section proved to be a muddled mess. Luckily a perfect pep talk from conductor Marco Sabiu was all the group needed and suddenly everything fell into place. After a few hours of every section rehearsing and a group that was more than game for the experience they did the final performance that finished with an impassioned plea by Zaffagnini for the Foo Fighters to play a show in Cesena.
The film features plenty of talking heads, from the organizers to the musicians. All of the musicians talked about how this was the experience of their life. You hear stories about how some people were ready to give up on music or their passion for music is so great they are frustrated they can’t earn a living from it. We see the immense joy and happiness this causes people and how it is saving them. Of course the goal was to get the attention of Dave Grohl, the lead singer of Foo Fighters, and when the video racked up over twelve million views in just a few short days it was only a matter of time before the band noticed.
While the start of the film is about getting a famous band to play a small town, by the end the documentary is about the community and love that people have for playing music. It’s impossible not to get emotional remembering concerts pre-pandemic and people who are accountants, telemarketers and graphic designers are literally the happiest they have ever been in their lives playing with this group of one thousand people. It doesn’t hurt that the final product they are producing sounds like a professional large scale orchestra worthy of paying big bucks to.
We Are The Thousand was seen during the 2021 Hot Docs Festival. Thank you to the festival and Scott Motisko PR for the screener. We Are The Thousand currently has no wide North American release date.
