True/False Films

Joy Division

In person: producer Tom Atencio.

Sneak preview. Bookending Joy Division with the city lights of Manchester, director Grant Gee communicates the profound changes initiated by four youths who, in 1976, attend a Sex Pistols concert and reinvent themselves as necessary pop stars. Soon they are known as Joy Division, led by the mesmerizing Ian Curtis, whose wide-eyed stare and gesticular dancing left peers and audiences rapt, and whose bipolar disorder led to great art and equally powerful despair. In less than four years, they indelibly changed pop music and were integral to the burgeoning Manchester music scene. The filmmakers capture essential interviews with bandmates and key figures, and unearth unseen performance video and recently discovered audiotape of the haunting, original voice of Curtis. Intertwined gracefully throughout the film, lost landmarks trace the razed ghosts of Manchester, measuring the profound social and cultural changes Joy Division witnessed and transcended. Plays with Under Construction (dir. Zhenchen Liu, 2007, 10 min.) — Through an arresting technique of animating photographs, we see that Shanghai's old buildings are being demolished wholesale. (MF)