Once you’ve got over the shock that VIVID Sydney is already here again, and that you might as well get on and book the work Christmas lunch, it’s time to get down and amongst it.
Each year as part of Vivid Sydney, Vivid LIVE takes over Sydney Opera House with a festival that explodes with some of the best music, art, and film you can see all year.
We’re taking a look here at the Film Program, which features 12 music films tracing how club culture has shaped music, identity and fashion, and its definitely a good excuse to put off ringing round all those restaurants to find a table in December with a 90 minute window – because lets be honest – you’ve already left it too late!
Shortwave x Soft Centre
Curated in collaboration with Soft Centre, an artist-led platform which activates experimental and interdisciplinary works across sound, digital media, performance, installation and hybrid practice.
Shortwave x Soft Centre will include the premiere of the new Shortwave commission by Passive Kneeling titled Echo Sleep, along with a program of films curated by Soft Centre and Passive Kneeling.
Asian Cinema Collective Presents: Linda Linda Linda
For Kei, Kyoko and Nozomi, their dream of playing the final high school concert together is dashed when their lead vocalist quits the band. Desperate, they recruit the very first person they see: Korean exchange student Son, played by Doona Bae (Bong Joon Ho’s The Host), whose comprehension of Japanese is limited. With time running out, the group struggles to learn three songs in three days for the festival’s rock concert.
Linda Linda Linda is about the unparalleled joy of jamming out with your friends. The soundtrack fuses tunes from iconic Japanese bands The Blue Hearts and Base Ball Bear with original music composed by James Iha of the Smashing Pumpkins.
Nobuhiro Yamashita’s feature is acknowledged by many as one of the greatest Japanese films of the 21st century, and screens here in a crisp 4K restoration.
The KLF: 23 Seconds to Eternity
The KLF became the biggest selling singles act in the world with a series of subversive international acid house anthems. 23 Seconds to Eternity represents the first time all of their films and music videos, produced and directed by Bill Butt, have been compiled and presented together.
23 Seconds to Eternity includes the remastered film The White Room (1989), an ‘ambient road movie’ following American police car Ford Timelord and Jimmy Cauty (Rockman Rock) and Bill Drummond (King Boy D) on a wild cross-country journey; a newly restored version of The Rites of Mu (1991), a 29-minute feature narrated by Martin Sheen, documenting a summer solstice event organised by The KLF on the Scottish island of Jura in 1991; plus the previously unreleased short Krash (1992), a record of the final and violent destruction of Ford Timelord.
The screening will also bring together the music videos for the hit singles Doctorin’ the Tardis (1988) by The Timelords, It’s Grim Up North (1991) by The JAMs and the rarely seen Kylie Said to Jason (1989), as well as the Stadium House Trilogy featuring the KLF’s international hits 3 A.M. Eternal, Last Train to Trancentral and What Time Is Love?, plus the single Justified & Ancient (1991) featuring lead vocals by “The First Lady of Country” Miss Tammy Wynette.
Daft Punk’s Electroma
When Daft Punk announced they would be directing their feature film debut in 2006, few knew what to expect. Certainly, no one banked on a 72-minute avant-garde science fiction film about the quest for two robots to become human (after all). Nor for its soundtrack to swerve away from the duo’s back catalogue and dive instead into deep cuts from Brian Eno, Curtis Mayfield, Todd Rundgren and Sebastien Tellier.
Both experimental and experiential, the film confounded critics on its release, but was embraced by fans and film-lovers on the midnight movie circuit. Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo noted “We wanted to make a question mark so people could project what they wanted onto Electroma – some people see it as sad, some as happy. Everyone is different.”
Twenty years after its release, Daft Punk’s Electroma is ripe for reevaluation both from die-hards and a new generation of fans, ready to fall in love with the famed French duo one more time. This special Vivid LIVE screening is the Australian premiere of a new 4K remaster, created to mark the 20th anniversary of this cult classic.
Saturday Film Club: True Stories – A Film By David Byrne
This special screening will feature an introduction and Q&A with Alexei Toliopoulos and Cameron James about the 1986 offbeat comedy directed by Talking Heads singer David Byrne.
Choosing the fictional location of Virgil, Texas in which to set his tale, Byrne introduces us to an eccentric assortment of characters, all working to celebrate a milestone anniversary for their much-loved town. Their tales may be tall, but all are inspired by real life, grown from stories that Byrne read in tabloids while on tour with Talking Heads.
Featuring music from Talking Heads, Kronos Quartet, Meredith Monk and more, ‘True Stories’ was Byrne’s directorial debut and remains his only narrative feature film. Nonetheless, it is a beautifully eccentric and underrated landmark of American indie cinema, conceived and lovingly brought to screen by one of music’s true mavericks.
Paris Is Burning
Made over seven years in the late 1980s, this landmark documentary depicts a New York fashion subculture, examining how the African American and Latinx Harlem drag ball community build sustenance, creativity and family.
Exploring ballroom culture – and defining and re-defining words like “house”, “mother”, “shade”, “voguing” and “realness” – Paris Is Burning offers an intimate portrait of rival fashion “houses” in a world rampant with homophobia and transphobia, racism, AIDS and poverty.
Featuring legendary voguers, drag queens and trans women – including Willi Ninja, Pepper LaBeija, Dorian Corey, and Venus Xtravaganza – Paris Is Burning brings it, celebrating the joy of movement, the force of eloquence and the draw of community.
24 Hour Party People
Michael Winterbottom’s iconoclastic drama-comedy charts the course of Manchester’s music scene from the 1970s to early 1990s, fronted by a gleefully anarchic performance by Steve Coogan.
Manchester, 1976: Cambridge educated Tony Wilson, a Granada TV Presenter, is at a Sex Pistols gig. Inspired by this pivotal moment in music history, he and his friends set up a record label, Factory Records, and proceed to sign a number of bands destined to be some of the most influential artists of their time. First, Joy Division, who go on to become New Order; then come the Happy Mondays.
What ensues is a tale of music, sex, drugs, larger-than-life characters and the birth of one of the most famous dance clubs in the world, The Hacienda. Vividly depicting the music and dance heritage of Manchester from the late 70s to the early 90s, 24 Hour Party People documents the vibrancy that made Mad-chester the place to be.
La Haine (Asian Dub Foundation Version)
La Haine takes place over 24 hours following the police shooting of a young man from a deprived housing estate, and shows the world through the eyes of three friends (Vincent Cassel, Saïd Taghmaoui and Hubert Kounde) frustrated with politicians, the media and police brutality.
Mathieu Kassovitz’s electrifying second feature as a director changed the cultural landscape of French cinema when it landed at the Cannes Film Festival in 1995, winning the Best Director prize. Its stark black-and-white visuals depicting graffiti-daubed streets helped to make it one of the defining films of its generation.
In 2001, Asian Dub Foundation premiered an original live score for the film at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, before bringing it to David Bowie’s Meltdown at London’s Southbank Centre in 2002. To mark the film’s 30th anniversary, the band returned to the same stage in 2025, where the performance was recorded as the soundtrack for the British 4K UHD release.
This Vivid LIVE screening represents the first time the film will be screened theatrically with the newly recorded Asian Dub Foundation soundtrack – a rare and unmissable event for fans of both the film and the band.
Absolute Beginners
Adapted from Colin MacInnes’ cult novel, Absolute Beginners winds the clock back to the pivotal British summer of 1958, chronicling a time when teenagers first came into their own and racism was on the rise in England.
Released in 1986, this ambitious musical was a creative gamble for Julien Temple, who made his mark in 1980 with The Sex Pistols’ film The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle – a gamble that was mitigated by the casting of David Bowie as advertising mogul Vendice Partners, and a breakthrough performance from actress, singer and model Patsy Kensit.
With Bowie’s theme song lodged near the top of the British charts for many weeks, and a soundtrack that also included Paul Weller’s Style Council, Ray Davies and Jerry Dammers from The Specials, the film nonetheless proved an uneasy fit for 1980s audiences: a lavish, big-budget spectacle that was also trying to grapple with social and political unrest.
40 years later, the film positively glows in a beautiful 4k restoration, and given a more nuanced reading, makes for a truly rewarding rediscovery.
Millennium Mambo
Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Palme d’Or-nominated cult classic stars Shu Qi as an aimless bar hostess drifting away from her slacker boyfriend and towards Jack Kao’s suave, sensitive gangster. A transfixing trance-out of a movie, drenched in club lights, ecstatic endorphin-rush exhilaration and a nagging undercurrent of weightlessness.
The director’s follow up to the widely acclaimed Flowers of Shanghai captures the sheer weightlessness, inertia and amnesia of life in contemporary Taipei. With magnificent cinematography from Mark Lee Ping-bing (In The Mood For Love), the hypnotic narrative focuses on Vicky as she floats into the new millennium seemingly unfettered by work, love or family.
Hsiao-Hsien Hou’s dreamlike, neon-filled film screens at Vivid LIVE newly restored in 4K.
Rave Culture: A New Era
Taking us from the streets of England to the dance floors of Tenerife, Rave Culture explores how an underground movement rose to transform the global music scene, challenging conventions and creating a lasting legacy.
From the rise of breakbeat to the explosion of acid house and beyond, the film takes us through a critical period in music and cultural history where ecstasy, creativity and freedom were the words to live by.
With exclusive interviews, unseen footage and a soundtrack featuring Orbital, The Prodigy, Goldie, Altern 8 and many more, the film reveals itself as a key chapter in the story of today’s festival landscape and the phenomenon of contemporary DJ culture.
Human Traffic
Hailed by The Guardian as “the last great film of the 90s”, Human Traffic is an unapologetic celebration of club culture and hedonism that has lost none of its energy.
Five Cardiff friends — trapped in dead-end jobs, bad relationships and dysfunctional families — plan a night out to remember. What follows is a wild, funny and surprisingly tender journey through clubs, drugs, pubs and parties, with unexpected epiphanies along the way.
Propelled by a joyous central performance from John Simm and marking Danny Dyer’s barnstorming feature debut, the film crackles with authenticity — and an unparalleled soundtrack featuring Underworld, Matthew Herbert, Fatboy Slim, Primal Scream and Orbital.
VIVID LIVE
22 May – 13 June 2026
