Free Party: A Folk History
Director: Aaron Trinder Run Time: 107 min. Format: DCP Rating: NR Release Year: 2023
Doc’n Roll Festival Presents: NYC PREMIERE
All they wanted was the freedom to party. The State saw them as the enemy within.
This DIY indie film follows the birth of the UK’s free party movement in the late 80s and early 90s and the social, political and cultural impact it’s had on our present times. For Conservatives, the movement’s DIY, anti-consumerist lifestyle, prophetic environmental concerns, radical direct-action, anti-road protest and animal welfare ethos threatened the foundations of the State. The film explores the inception of the movement, a meeting between urban ravers and the new age travelers during Thatcher’s last days in power, and the explosive years that followed, leading up the infamous Castlemorton free festival in 1992 – the largest ever illegal rave, which provoked the drastic change of the laws of trespass with the notorious introduction of the Criminal Justice Act in 1994.
Eschewing tired formulaic filmmaking styles and tokenistic big name DJ sound-bites, this exhilarating modern day folktale is told exclusively by those who were in the thick of it and features interviews with members of Spiral Tribe, DIY Sound system, Bedlam and many others.