Music, movies, mutinies and dance moves at the Doc’n Roll Film Festival

Next week will see a selection of documentary features about music screen in Smithfield, as well as Galway, as the Light House and Pálás hold host to the Doc’n Roll Film Festival.

Beginning in London and hitting the road on tour to cities across Britain and Ireland, this festival has screened films in an effort to celebrate music subcultures, providing a unique platform to support c documentaries about performers, labels, scenes and stories for music lovers. Established in London in 2014 by Dubliner Colm Forde, Doc’n Roll has grown to become an annual UK-wide event, with editions in Brooklyn, San Francisco and LA planned for 2024. This year the annual blend of documentary films and outlier musical exploration expands to encompass cultural scene of Dublin.

The Irish edition will be taking place from the 15th to the 20th of February at the Light House Cinema – plus one screening at Galway’s Pálás cinema.

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. Featured artists include Nick Cave, Mick Harvey, Judee Sill, Dj Fergie and hard-house legend Tony De Vit.


You can see more about the films on offer at the Doc’n Roll Film Festival below.

15 Feb – Light House Dublin – Mutiny in Heaven: The Birthday Party (Tickets)

17 Feb – Pálás Galway – Mutiny in Heaven: The Birthday Party (Tickets)

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 (Tickets)

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 (Tickets)

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 (Tickets)

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.

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