IFFR 2025
Pavements
Cinema Forum Groningen
Nieuwe Markt 1, 9712KN GroningenHow do you commemorate iconic 90s band Pavement? With a layered meta-documentary like this one. In Pavements, archive footage overlaps with footage from a musical, a parody, a biopic and a pop-up museum-until the band is hard to distinguish from the legend.
Pavements is several films in one, a mishmash of archive footage and footage from newer projects-not always authentic and meticulously plotted by filmmaker Alex Ross Perry. Fans steal T-shirts from the walls in a museum dedicated to the band, where real and fake artefacts are mixed together. Broadway stars audition for a jukebox musical and make Pavement's notoriously listless songs sparkle. And Hollywood actors make a parody of an overlong biopic, in which Stranger Things' Joe Keery panickedly confides to his dialect coach that he is slowly turning into the real Stephen Malkmus. As these elements become more overlapping, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish the band from the legend.
Just let this heady, kaleidoscopic cinematic experience wash over you.