Over the weekend, Ray Pride posted a long interview with Chicago music scene stallwart/budding filmmaker Tim Kinsella. I’ve been a fan of Kinsella since discovering his first band, Cap’n Jazz, when I was in high school. By the time I moved to Kinsella’s home base of Chicago in the late 90s to go to art school, Kinsella was on his second album of experimental quasi-electronic indie rock with Joan of Arc. He’s since released half a dozen records under the Joan of Arc name, and countless more with tangential side projects such as Make Believe and Friend/Enemy.

Frustrated with what he calls the “lousy cost/benefit ratio” of life as a semi-well-known indie musician, Kinsella also recently wrote and directed his first feature film, titled Orchard Vale. It’s set to open the Chicago Underground Film Festival on Wednesday.

It’s a logical transition, as much of the Joan of Arc output has been infused with clear cinematic elements. The cover art for Joan of Arc’s 1999 album Live in Chicago 1999 (which was not a live album) featured recreations of scenes from Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend; on one of that record’s tracks, Kinsella lamented that he’d “only want to make a film if it was in French/and I don’t speak French.” Later JoA records like the The Gap and In Rape Fantasy and Terror Sex We Trust sounded like self-contained soundtracks for neo-realist disaster films. So I guess it’s no surprise that Orchard Vale is, as described by Pride, a “claustrophobic experimental feature about a band of outsiders after an off-screen collapse of civilization.”

The big takeaway from the interview for me (aside from the part where Kinsella says he was going around describing Orchard as “Anne Frank set in the future” until his editor begged him to stop) is the idea that being a truly independent filmmaker today is a lot like being in a punk band ten or fifteen years ago. This is a concept that I keep going back to: in many ways, the whole Mumblecorps movement feels more like an indie rock scene than any post-Sundance indie film scene, and at their best, film blogs are to these films and their audiences what DIY zines were to indie records and their consumers in the early-to-mid 90s.

As Kinsella puts it: “I guess the music-industry life lesson that enabled me to embark on this Orchard Vale pit would be more a matter of internalizing the DIY ethics of my formative punk rock years and extrapolating that approach from hanging your own flyers to making a movie.”

The interview was also made me really excited about Kinsella’s next project, which he describes as “a story of grown-up burnouts living in their parents’ basements in the suburbs [which was[ greatly influenced by living with [Orchard editor Amy Cargill] while she was cutting Nice Bombs, so every time I’d walk in the room there’d be some horrible Baghdad reality, as well as my cousin [Nate Kinsella] getting out of jail and telling me stories. The screenplay is really a warped consolidation of those two influences.”

More information about the Chicago Underground Film Festival can be found here. I’ve also embedded the Orchard Vale trailer above.