• 8647 Sun, 17 Aug 2025 18:30:00 @ The Capitol
• 8895 Wed, 20 Aug 2025 18:00:00 @ Hoyts Melbourne Central Cinema 11
• 8962 Sat, 23 Aug 2025 21:00:00 @ Cinema Nova 1

Director: Alex Ross Perry
Producer: Robert Greene,Danny Gabai,Alex Needles,Craig Butta,Arrow Kruse,Lance Bangs
Screenwriter: Alex Ross Perry
Cinematographer: Robert Kolodny
Composer: Dabney Morris,Keegan DeWitt
Editor: Robert Greene
Production Designer: John Arnos
Costume Designer: Amanda Ford

Irreverent indie rock pioneers Pavement go through the looking glass in Alex Ross Perry’s multilayered documentary experiment.

As comedian Tim Heidecker explains onscreen, Pavement was the ideal band “for kids who thought everything was stupid and everything sucked”. That includes reverent talking-heads music docos. So as the Gen X slacker icons prepare for their first live shows in 12 years to mark the 30th anniversary of their breakthrough album Slanted and Enchanted, parallel Pavement projects burnish their legacy in rich layers of artifice and authenticity. There’s a pop-up Pavement Museum of band artefacts and memorabilia; a proposed big-budget biopic starring Joe Keery and Jason Schwartzman; and an earnest new jukebox musical, rehearsed by an off-Broadway cast. 

These projects – some real, some created out of whole cloth – are the brainchildren of director and Bright Horizons Jury member Alex Ross Perry (Queen of Earth, MIFF 2015; Videoheaven, MIFF 2025), who with a straight face declares Pavement to be “the world’s most important and influential band”. His genre mashup of sincere experimentalism, ironic detachment and prickly humour is the best way to pay homage to Stephen Malkmus, Scott ‘Spiral Stairs’ Kannberg, Mark Ibold, Steve West and Bob Nastanovich, capturing how their band flirted with mainstream popularity before skulking into underground legend.

“Part sincere, part fuck-you, a dash of incoherent anti-establishment thought and a tablespoon of self-indulgence … Making a film about the band any other way seems like a complete waste of time.” – IndieWire

PRESENTED BY

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Director Alex Ross Perry is a guest of the festival and will be in attendance at the Sunday 17 and Wednesday 20 August sessions. Featured subject Scott Kannberg is also a guest of the festival and will be in attendance at the Sunday 17 August session.