Returning from Hamburg

The experience last month at the Reeperbahn Festival (Hamburg) and Sydney Underground Film Festival was positively excellent. Especially after being in the edit room for so long, it was an incredible feeling to finally have the film screen at these events. It was amazing to watch the film with an audience finally, both locally and from afar. I had never been to Hamburg before and I loved it - particularly the beautiful town of Lüneberg. Experiencing the film with the Reeperbahn audience was particularly interesting, especially considering how many other events the audience could have occupied themselves with, yet chose to stay and watch the film.

The Sydney audience a few days before was electric and was a dream come true to watch in my home town, and will hopefully be a sign of things to come. Film critic, Anthony O’Connor of FilmInk, who hosted the Q&A afterwards, had this to say about the Sydney screening,

So UNDERGROUND INC., the film I hosted a Q&A for at the Sydney Underground Film Festival last night, is a fantastic exploration of the alternative music scene of the 90s. This thing is a DEEP DIVE into bands I'd completely forgotten about (Cop Shoot Cop!) and others I'd never heard of, but will be listening to today.

Look, I've seen a lot of documentaries at a lot of film festivals, but the atmosphere in the screening of this one was electric. Partially that's due to a baked-in love of the 90s that the audience brought with them, but a larger part comes from a skilful curation of some 90+ hours of footage (!!!) into a more manageable feature length form.

What I'm saying is, if you're even vaguely interested in that fascinating, unique period of music that exploded in the 1990s and died before the decade was through, you should get your eyeballs on UNDERGROUND INC. toot-fuggen-suite.

Thanks to the organisers of both events.

Next stop - London!