Hit play on these must-see music docos at Revelation Film Festival 2025

Revelation Perth International Film Festival is back in 2025, screening at Luna Leederville, Luna on SX, and The Backlot from Wednesday, July 2 to Sunday, July 13. From outrageous animation and genre-defining horror to poetic coming-of-age tales and restored cinematic landmarks, the program includes 45 features and documentaries and more than 100 short films, as Rev lives up to its reputation as one of the most daring and diverse film festivals down under. Music fans have a lot to look forward to in 2025, with documentaries exploring the lives of music’s great innovators, pioneers and personalities from both Australia and around the world. Check out the highlights below.

ENO

This documentary is literally one of a kind. No one screening is the same as the last thanks to generative AI variations applied to every film that provides 52 quintillion possible iterations. For lovers of this genius of electronic music, this approach is no real surprise. Brian Eno, known for producing David Bowie, U2, and Talking Heads, among many others; pioneering the genre of ambient music; and releasing more than 40 solo and collaboration albums—reveals his creative processes in this groundbreaking documentary. Eno is the world’s first generative cinematic documentary, and, like a musical performance that’s different every night, Eno creates a unique viewing experience for each audience.

Pavements   

A joyously entertaining and endlessly fascinating hybrid work—Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements challenges the limits of the rock documentary. Taking multiple strands, the film follows the band, documents the creation of Range Life (a big-budget, feature-length biopic of the band starring Stranger Things’ Joe Kerry as Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus), the creation of Slanted! Enchanted!, an off-Broadway jukebox musical, and the opening of the Pavement Museum. Pavements is a docufiction film that re-imagines the possibility of the music documentary, the myths of rock music, and, somewhere, the story of an indie rock band.

Marlon Williams: 2 Worlds – Nga Ao E Rua

A fascinating, beautifully produced documentary focusing on musician Marlon Williams that weaves the musician’s story through culture, family, friendship, and the Aotearoa New Zealand landscapes. Ursula Grace Williams’ film tells the story of the New Zealand indie alt-country musician Marlon Williams as he starts to write an album in te reo Māori and the personal journey he undertakes in this process. Filmed over four years, the documentary explores music, performance, and the creation of the album, each element becoming a way in which other stories emerge. Ursula Williams will be attending as a guest of the festival.

Abebe Butterfly Song

In 1986, Melbourne musician David Bridie of the groups Not Drowning, Waving and My Friend the Chocolate Cake travelled to Papua New Guinea, where he heard the heartfelt sounds of George Telek and the Moab Stringband’s song Abebe (Butterfly Song) on board a bus. It marked the beginning of Bridie and Telek’s bond that would last more than 30 years. Together, their collaboration on critically acclaimed albums and tours has helped amplify Papuan string-band sounds and languages, like Tok Pisin and Kuanua, outside the country. Abebe – Butterfly Song combines visits to Port Moresby and Rabaul with archival footage from tours and recording sessions in Australia, Europe and the Pacific, as well as candid interviews with the pair, their friends and collaborators.

Pauline Black: A 2-Tone Story

Pauline Black, lead singer of 2-Tone hit band The Selecter, tells her extraordinary life story in the same frank manner that helped shape her as an iconic, era-defining female musician. Pauline had a difficult upbringing, and joining the 2-Tone music movement in 1979 was the perfect catalyst, enabling her to explore and express all sides of herself. Looking back at her own groundbreaking experience in this feature documentary, Pauline traces how her legacy came about and how it is relevant to the world today, especially where society pushes the boundaries of gender, politics, race and identity.

Big Mama Thornton: I Can’t Be Anyone But Me

Robert Clem returns with this fascinating documentary about blues singer Willie Mae ‘Big Mama’ Thornton. Those who are regular Rev attendees will remember Clem’s How They Got Over: Gospel Quartets and the Road to Rock and Roll from 2018. Big Mama Thornton: I Can’t Be Anyone But Me is the story of the singer who sang Hound Dog before Elvis Presley and who wrote Ball and Chain, made famous by Joplin. What emerges from the archive footage and talking head interviews is a portrait of an incredible singer, with an equally fascinating life, who refused to sing anything unless it “sang to her soul” and who defied the gender norms of her era.

TWST: Things We Said Today

Drawing on many hours of home movie footage, alongside newsreel footage, Andrei Ujica (The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu) constructs an experimental documentary of the Beatles in New York during one summer weekend in 1965. The film shifts between the band—chased by crowds of obsessive fans and the press trying to explain pop culture and Beatlemania—and a poetic, personal animation that follows the experiences of young fans that draws on the contemporaneous journals and autofiction. Everything is contextualised by newsreel footage of other events that take place that weekend.

Whoopee Blues

Mic and Jim Conway have been playing together since they were at school, co-founding the Jellybean Jug Band, which became the Captain Matchbox Whoopee Band, a joyous celebration of twenties and thirties ragtime, vaudeville, and jazz that became an unexpected success in the seventies. Whoopee Blues tells the brothers’ story, from these early bands through to their subsequent careers, which saw Mic Conway embrace vaudeville, children’s entertainment, stage magic, and much more, from the National Junk Band to performances with The Wiggles and appearing on Humphrey B. Bear.

Revelation Perth International Film Festival runs from Wednesday, July 2 to Sunday, July 13, 2025. Tickets are on sale now from revelationfilmfest.org