IT CAME FROM AQUARIUS RECORDS tells the story about the San Francisco based independent record store, Aquarius Records. Having closed in 2016 after 47 years, this small apartment-sized store championed local, underground, independent, and challenging music to the masses - most memorably with their infamous bi-weekly, college essay-length, new-release lists. Six years in the making, interviewing collectors, musicians, and store owners, the film has a very personal angle, with lots of behind-the-scenes footage (and drama) that shows both the joy and excruciating stress that comes with running — and closing — a store like this, helped in no part by the changing city around them.
Writing
Those legendary new-release lists deserve their own documentary.
Direction
Six years of access pays off in brutally honest closure footage.
Production
Claustrophobic store shots make you smell the dust and desperation.
Director
Kenneth Thomas
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Aquarius's new-release lists were so dense and passionately written that collectors treated them as required reading, not just shopping guides. Some ran longer than the albums they described.
The store sat in the Mission District through three waves of tech-boom gentrification; the film quietly documents how San Francisco's artistic soul got priced out block by block.
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