Doc’N’Roll Film Festival has been announced for The Lighthouse Cinema from February 15th to 20th.
The festival with an emphasis on alternative music and indie documentary subcultures, was started in the UK by Dubliner Colm Forde in 2014, and has grown to become an annual UK-wide event, with editions in Brooklyn, San Francisco and LA planned for 2024.
The Dublin programme has been announced and will take place at The Lighthouse Cinema in Smithfield, and there will be one screening at Galway’s Pálás cinema also.
The programme of 4 Irish premiere feature films, spotlights a broad range of music genres and scenes, including rave, post-punk, folk and electronic music.
Artists featured include Nick Cave, Mick Harvey, Judee Sill, Dj Fergie and hard-house legend Tony De Vit.
The screenings will be accompanied by a post-screening Q&A.
Doc’N’Roll Film Festival programme
15 Feb – Lighthouse Dublin – Mutiny in Heaven: The Birthday Party
17 Feb – Pálás Galway – Mutiny in Heaven: The Birthday Party
Narrated exclusively by the original Birthday Party band members, Mutiny in Heaven delves deep into a band’s psyche, chronicling how Nick Cave and his school friends began captivating audiences with their confrontational performances, primal screams, outlaw gothic horror and anarchic lifestyle.
17 Feb – Free Party: A Folk History + Zoom Q&A
All they wanted was the freedom to party. The State saw them as the enemy within.
A timely DIY indie film that follows the birth of the UK’s free party rave movement from the late 80s and early 90s and the social, political and cultural impact it’s had on our present times. The film explores the inception of the movement, a meeting between urban ravers and the new age travellers during Thatcher’s last days in power, and the explosive years that followed. Featuring Spiral Tribe, DiY, Circus Warp, and Bedlam sound systems.
18 Feb – Don’t Ever Stop – The Story of Tony de Vit + Q&A
Working-class gay DJ Tony De Vit invented hard house music and made it mainstream – his fans included Madonna and Boy George when he was the star attraction at all-night London club Trade. In 1996, in his late 30s, he was on the cusp of becoming one the biggest DJs in the world. Robert Ferguson, already known as Fergie, was a 15-year-old budding DJ in a small town in Northern Ireland. This powerful documentary tells the story of how three men’s lives became intertwined in a tale of love, loss, gay identity, hero worship, attitudes to AIDS and the 90s boom in dance music.
20 Feb – Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill + Zoom Q&A
This brilliant film is an intimate portrait of an unsung musical artist, largely told by Judee herself. It charts the vertiginous arc of Judee’s life from a deeply troubled adolescence of abuse, addiction and prison through her meteoric rise in the music world. She went from living in a car with four others sleeping in shifts to appearing on the cover of Rolling Stone in four years. Interviews with friends and contemporaries, including Graham Nash, Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne and David Geffen give a first-hand experience of Judee’s personality, talents and struggles.
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, Cara Magazine, Sunday Times, Totally Dublin, Red Bull and more. Niall is a DJ, founder of Lumo Club, club promoter, event curator and producer of gigs, listening parties & events in Dublin.
