The Doc’n Roll Festival Dublin returns for its third year with a programme celebrating music pioneer, iconoclasts and legends.
Irish premieres of music documentaries about Butthole Surfers and Meredith Monk are to be featured, alongside films about Coil and Glen Matlock of The Sex Pistols.
“This year’s programme reflects our DIY spirit and our commitment to giving a platform to the charismatic, compelling, unforgettable talents outside the mainstream. As an independent festival, we take pride in working against the grain, and we’re thrilled to showcase filmmakers and musicians whose bold creativity aligns with our ethos.”
Colm Forde, programmer and co-founder of Doc’n Roll Film Fest
Full information and screenings at Lighthouse Cinema this October and November below.
FILM PROGRAMME INFORMATION
18 OCTOBER – LIGHTHOUSE CINEMA
BUTTHOLE SURFERS: THE HOLE TRUTH AND NOTHING BUTT
Tom Stern| US|2025|106 min
The story of two accounting students from Trinity University in San Antonio who found solidarity in their shared strangeness, gathered a tribe of like-minded outsiders – queers, weirdos and nonconformists, including the unforgettable naked performance artist/dancer Kathleen Lynch – and launched one of the most radical and unpredictable paths in rock history. Against all odds, and with a proudly unmarketable name, they became a legendary psychedelic punk band: unlikely icons who inspired acts like Nirvana and even landed a number one hit. Butthole Surfers’ live shows were one-of-a-kind events – communal rites of passage for band and audience, and the antithesis of the digital isolation of our modern age. The film also goes deep on the personal lives behind the chaos, with intimate portraits of lead singer Gibby Haynes, guitar wizard Paul Leary, drummers Teresa Nervosa and King Coffey, and bassist Jeff Pinkus: uncompromising originals whose lives took extraordinary turns.
19 OCTOBER – LIGHTHOUSE CINEMA
A WAY TO DIE: THE SHORT FILMS OF COIL
Xavier Laradji, Maxime Lachaud|FRANCE|2024| 100mins
In tribute to the photographic and pictorial art of COIL’s founding members Peter Christopherson (1955–2010) and John Balance (1962–2004), Timeless Editions have restored the duo’s filmed archives to reveal a first-rate cinematic body of work. Incorporating medical art, homoerotic performances and body horror, these short 8mm and 16mm films are rooted in the aesthetic of England’s industrial scene of the post-punk era. At the intersections of Eros and Thanatos, these images assembled into a raw, hallucinatory and immersive film evoke Georges Bataille, J.G. Ballard, Jean Genet, Derek Jarman and the Viennese Actionists. Accompanied by previously unreleased COIL compositions, A Way to Die is a unique document: sensual, disturbing, and profoundly haunted.
20 OCTOBER – LIGHTHOUSE CINEMA
I WAS A TEENAGE SEX PISTOL – GLEN MATLOCK
Nick Mead, Andre Relis|US|2025|90 min
A compelling filmic setting for the wry, honest and often hilarious firsthand stories of Glen Matlock, the founding member of the Sex Pistols who co-wrote ten of the 12 iconic songs on their only studio album, Never Mind the Bollocks, only to have his contributions later downplayed. Hear his account of the Pistols’ rise in a frank, insightful portrait of a group of malcontents determined to change the music business and attack society’s hypocrisy and stale conventions. Vividly evoking the bleakness of the UK in the early Seventies that was the backdrop to the excitement of the exploding punk scene, we hear of the provocations of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s SEX shop, bandmate Steve Jones’s thieving, the band’s search for a singer, bust-ups, fan fervour and tabloid outrage.
20 NOVEMBER – LIGHTHOUSE CINEMA
MONK IN PIECES
Billy Shebar & David C. Roberts |US/Germany/France|2025|94 min
Meredith Monk – composer, performer, and interdisciplinary artist – is one of the great artistic pioneers of our time, yet her profound cultural influence is largely unrecognised. With Monk’s music at its centre, and featuring interviews with Björk and David Byrne, Monk in Pieces is a mosaic that mirrors the structure of Monk’s own work, and illuminates her wildly original vocabulary of sound and imagery. As a female artist in the male-dominated downtown New York arts scene of the 1960s and 1970s, Monk had to fight for recognition and resources. Early reviews in the New York Times were vicious and sexist: “A disgrace to the name of dancing,” wrote Clive Barnes; “so earnestly strange in a talented little-girl way,” wrote John Rockwell. Yet as her celebrated contemporary Philip Glass says, “she, among all of us, was – and still is – the uniquely gifted one.” In the film’s final chapters, Monk faces mortality. We see her warily entrust her masterpiece, ATLAS, to director Yuval Sharon and singer Joanna Lynn-Jacobs for a new production at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. For 60 years, Monk has directed and performed in all of her music theatre works; now she must learn to let go. What will happen to such singular work after she is gone?
About Doc’n Roll Film Festival:
Founded in 2013 Doc’n Roll Films is a female-led film agency that platforms and champions marginal voices in the music and arts industries; we are passionate about DIY spirit, independent film and music of all genres. Our mission is to celebrate music and arts subcultures by providing a unique platform to support creative, compelling and unforgettable documentaries that celebrate the performers, labels, scenes and stories.
Doc’n Roll Film Festival is the UK and Ireland’s premier documentary film festival dedicated to music and arts subcultures, celebrating the power of stories told through sound and vision. Founded in 2014 in London, it champions independent filmmaking and provides a platform for under-the-radar music and arts documentaries that deserve to be seen and heard. Originally a UK-based event, it has expanded to include editions in Dublin, Amsterdam, New York, and San Francisco. With premiere screenings, director Q&As, and special Doc’n Roll connects passionate audiences with films that explore diverse genres, subcultures, and untold stories. The festival’s mission is simple: to amplify bold filmmaking that champions marginal voices across the music and art industries while connecting with subcultures fans everywhere.
We present audiences with the opportunity to watch these films as they were designed to be watched – LOUD.
Niall Byrne is the founder of the most-influential Irish music site Nialler9, where he has been writing about music since 2005. He is the co-host of the Nialler9 Podcast and has written for the Irish Times, Irish Independent, Sunday Times, Totally Dublin, Cara Magazine, Red Bull and more. Niall is a DJ, co-founder of Lumo Club, event curator, Indie Sleaze club promoter, and producer of gigs and monthly listening parties & events in Dublin.
