Screened as part of 2024

Eno 2024

Directed by Gary Hustwit Rhythms

This groundbreaking documentary on musician, artist and superstar producer Brian Eno changes every time it screens. The two New Zealand premiere screenings at the Festival will both be completely different and will never be seen again.

Aug 15

The Civic

USA In English
90 minutes Colour / DCP

Director

Producers

Jessica Edwards, Gary Hustwit

Cinematography

Mary Farbrother

Editors

Maya Tippett, Marley McDonald

Software Programming

Brendan Dawes. Generative software by Anamorph

Music

Brian Eno

With

Brian Eno

Festivals

Sundance, CPH:DOX, Hot Docs 2024

Elsewhere

Visionary artist and musical pioneer Brian Eno is perhaps best known for being a founding member of Roxy Music and for the series of landmark solo albums that popularised ambient music to the masses. As a producer, he has collaborated with artists including David Bowie, Talking Heads, U2 and Coldplay. He has exhibited his visual art around the world and written extensively on music, art and culture. He even had a memorable cameo in the 1990s sitcom Father Ted as “Father Brian Eno” and scored the Netflix series Top Boy.

A conventional documentary couldn’t hope to cover a career this wide and diverse, but director Gary Hustwit, taking inspiration from Eno’s own experiments in generative music that evolves over time, has instead created a world-first generative documentary. Much like a musical performance that changes every night, every screening of Eno is completely different to the last. Utilising a bespoke software system developed by Hustwit and digital artist Brendan Dawes, the film has millions of possible variations drawing from original interviews and Eno’s archive of hundreds of hours of unreleased footage and music. Eschewing and subverting the traditional grand narrative usual for musical biopics of this type, Hustwit and Eno’s collaboration is literally a one-of-a-kind event designed to be experienced on the big screen. — Michael McDonnell 

“Charming, smart, sensitive, genial, and exuding an almost childlike passion for and profound (though never pretentious) questioning of the musical art-form, Eno makes for great company, regardless of the film’s innovative making.” — Anthony Kaufman, Screen Daily