For Samantha Hale, music is the greatest healer.

After losing her father, Hale embarked on a trip to follow Imogen Heap to different venues and get away from her grief.

Map the Music is a mostly amateur-constructed account of Hale’s journey to various shows and her talks with fans and various musicians, including Heap herself. What you will get here is not a collection of sweeping landscapes or carefully calculated shots, but the honest and raw journey of someone who admits she’s not a filmmaker (although she is the granddaughter of Alan Hale Jr., the Skipper on “Gilligan’s Island”). She simply wants to share her story with the world.

For Hale, the decision to first embark on this unusual journey wasn’t always clear.

“When I lost my dad, I actually had lots of shows planned of Imogen Heap. I was so heartbroken, I wasn’t gonna go, but my friends convinced me to. For those three hours of the show, it didn’t hurt anymore. I felt OK again,” Hale says.

Her love of music and live shows tracks back to her childhood, in which she remembers her mom accompanying her to various concerts, sometimes standing outside if she didn’t get a ticket. Her extreme interest in live music stayed strong, as she oftentimes travels to various cities to catch shows, the energy from devoted music fans and the passion of the performing musicians. For her, the experience is not seeing the performance for the first time but meeting new people, bonding with friends and experiencing each individual gig.

“It always just made me feel alive and in that moment, which I think is such a difficult thing to do, because we’re so distracted,” says Hale.

For Hale, the journey showed her that the power of music influences many people. Music is something more than just the performance of tracks in front of an audience. From speaking to a wide spectrum of people, Hale found that music had the ability to save.

“What I want to express with this film is no matter what happened to you or the situation, music can help,” Hale offers.

The most touching aspect of the film is Hale’s absolute willingness to share even the most complicated emotions. She not only spoke to music fans with heart-wrenching stories and musicians whose tracks expressed an inner turmoil, she also shared her own emotional journey. At one point in the film, she lets the camera stay on her as she begins to cry and deal with her grief. In what Hale calls an “organic moment,” she speaks to the camera in honest terms about the way her pain is catching up to her, addressing the viewer as if she were alone in the room.

“I never thought about why I did it. I just went on instinct, I guess. I was about a week into filming when I got that breakdown about my dad. It really dawned on me that this is real. Your dad is really gone, and you’re really out on the road for six weeks. You’re really doing this. I figured, I’m going to show people what I’m talking about.”

In fact, the entire film seems to stumble upon human nature in the process of finding what makes music so important to so many people. For Hale, music is a higher form of expression that manages to unite all people and reach out to anyone and everyone.

The film shows not only the various personalities of music fans but the personas of the musicians Hale travels to see. In a surprising moment, the audience gets to see Hale play the piano right next to Heap. The film shows the two having what looks like casual conversations, the barrier between music fan and successful musician completely broken down.

“She’s just incredible. She’s so down-to-earth and in touch with everything. She’s one of the most down-to-earth, supportive people you’re going to meet, so I knew she wouldn’t look at me like I was a weirdo,” Hale says.

From the teenagers to the middle-aged fans Hale interviewed, the overriding love of music is palpable.

“We’re all on a journey to figure out who we are, and music is a great way to identify where you fall in,” Hale says.



Map the Music is currently available.