Ulrich said that the documentary featured interviews with their followers and was intended to spotlight who exactly these fans are. The movie was Metallica’s idea, he said, and dated to their WorldWired tour, when they introduced the “black ticket,” which gave fans access to all the tour’s shows.

As Ulrich told it, Metallica’s four members saw the same faces at their concerts during the tour and started interacting with them. “The more we realized how diverse and unique this group of fans were, it felt like diving deeper into who they were, getting a little of their back story, and connecting some dots and highlighting them would be a super fun project to share with the world,” he said.

A handful of the musicians in the spotlight at Tribeca will be behind the camera, experimenting with a different medium from singing or songwriting.

The pop singer Miley Cyrus is making her mark as a director, screenwriter and producer with the 55-minute pop opera “Something Beautiful,” featuring songs from the eponymous album. Cyrus is the only person onscreen, and she said that the film used her songs to take audiences on a journey.

“It’s not linear like a traditional movie,” she said in a phone interview. The movie included moments of abstract visuals, Cyrus said, as well as her performing songs onstage, such as “End of the World.” “It’s a unique blending of a lot of different things I like to do,” she said. “I am not a character-based artist.”

Cyrus’s impetus for creating “Something Beautiful” was her interest in an album becoming a theatrical release. She picked up several skills during the filmmaking process, she said. “Technically, I learned how to be very effective with a small space and minimal crew,” Cyrus said. “The thing I love about music is that it’s instant gratification. You can walk into a room, and a song doesn’t exist, and then you can walk out of that room, and a song can exist. It’s not that way with films.”