By DCist contributor Mehan Jayasuriya

Having never been to a film screening at the Black Cat’s backstage before, I must admit that I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I showed up on Monday night. As I found out, I was in for a night of uncomfortable zebra-print chairs, chain-smokers in linen pants and a seven-year old film on DVD, projected onto a pull-down screen. So yeah, exactly what I should have expected. The movie in question was The Shield Around The K (being screened as a benefit for All Our Power), a documentary film on the topic of K Records, the prototypical indie-pop label from Olympia, Washington. More specifically, The Shield Around The K is a portrait of K’s early years and a fawning love note to K co-founder Calvin Johnson.

Directed by Heather Rose Dominic, the film opens, appropriately enough, with grainy camcorder footage of Calvin Johnson on-stage with Beat Happening, tossing candy (vegan, of course) into an appreciative crowd. Appropriate not only because Beat Happening will be forever synonymous with the term “twee” but also because this scene sets the stage for the rest of the film: a video documentary that’s more about the mythology of Calvin Johnson than it is about the label itself.