BRIAN ENO | Vivid Film | Live Remix

Following its world premiere at Sundance this year, the Australian premiere of groundbreaking new "generative" documentary ENO – about Brian Eno– takes place at Vivid Festival with filmmaker Gary Hustwit visiting Australia to "remix" each screening at the Sydney Opera House.

Visionary musician and artist Brian Eno – renowned producer (David Bowie, U2, Talking Heads, Grace Jones amongst many others); pioneering the genre of ambient music; and releasing more than 40 solo and collaboration albums – reveals his creative processes in the utterly unique documentary ENO: a film that’s different every time it’s shown.

Filmmaker Gary Hustwit (Helvetica, Moog, Skate Dreams) set out to decode Eno’s creative strategies and examine his lifelong search for the meaning of music in the first career-spanning documentary of the legendary and prolific artist. Instead of a by-the-numbers bio-doc, Hustwit and his collaborators invented an approach befitting the iconoclast’s use of new technologies. The new ENO film is therefore 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. Utilising a proprietary software system developed by Hustwit and digital artist Brendan Dawes, the film has millions of possible variations of scenes and footage drawn from Hustwit’s original interviews and Eno’s rich archive of hundreds of hours of never-before-seen footage and unreleased music.

The result is a film that resonates with Eno’s own artistic practice, his methods of using technology to compose music, and his endless deep dive into the mercurial essence of creativity.

With Brian Eno having curated the first ever Vivid Festival back in 2009 – where he curated the Luminous music line-up – these 2024 film events are something of a return to the Sydney Opera House for Eno, some 15 years later.

“Groundbreaking…Remixes the music doc – and Brian Eno’s entire career.” Rolling Stone

“Revolutionary” Screen Daily 

“Remarkable” Forbes

“A template for how cinema can be re-defined in the digital age” The Quietus