Mosh Film Fest at Chapeltown Picture House

Tom Grieve, Cinema Editor

Book now

Mosh Film Fest

Cultplex, Manchester
20-21 May 2022

Always double check opening hours with the venue before making a special visit.

Mosh Film Festival
Book now

Coming to Manchester’s Chapeltown Picture House this May is a brand new film festival dedicated to celebrating metal in all its forms. Spread across Friday 20 and Saturday 21 May, Mosh Film Fest is a headbangers paradise, featuring legendary docs, hardcore thrillers and dark-hearted dramas that explore the genre – and its many sub-genres – from all angles, culminating in a cine club night that takes advantage of the pounding cinema soundsystem.

Aesthetically speaking, metal makes for perfect cinematic fodder. Bands and audiences have long cultivated looks that tangle with horror imagery, bump up against the occult, and frighten parents the world over. Strobe-lit leather jackets, metal studs and a face full of make-up are as impactful in close-up as they are from the mosh pit – and that’s before we add the brutal lyrics and face-melting riffs to the soundtrack.

Aesthetically speaking, metal makes for perfect cinematic fodder.

Mosh Film Fest takes you backstage with some of the genre’s biggest legends with docs such as Murder in the Front Row: The San Francisco Bay Area Thrash Metal Story which features the likes of Metallica, Slayer and Megadeth explaining how their brand of metal came about in reaction to early 1980s MTV hard rock; and Penelope Spheeris’ iconic The Decline of Western Civilization Pt. 2: The Metal Years featuring Ozzy Osbourne, Alice Cooper, Lemmy and more.

There’s room for fiction too, with a chance to catch the late Anton Yelchin’s superb turn in Jeremy Saulnier’s anti-nazi punk thriller Green Room which closes Friday’s screenings. From Iceland, Ragnar Bragason’s Malmhaus is a suitably dark dramatisation of the ghoulish Black Metal scene, while Deathgasm is a gory supernatural horror-comedy about a New Zealand metalhead adrift in a sea of jocks and cheerleaders.

Malmhaus
Malmhaus

As with any outsider music, it is the dedication of the communities that surround metal which sustain it. Mosh mix local and global perspectives, with ‘90s BBC doc In Bed with Chris Needham – about a teenage metalhead forming a band and getting a girlfriend – showing alongside Scream For Me Sarajevo which documents Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson and his band Skunkworks performance in the war torn city in 1994.

Similarly, Global Metal finds communities around the world and examines the role metal plays in helping likeminded people find each other, and their own form of self-expression. This follows The World According to Mosh – a selection of shorter pieces curated by the festival to show off the various intersections of identity, class, sexuality, religion, gender, race and culture that fall under metal’s gnarly umbrella.

The festival concludes on a high with an event that is part club night, part film screening. The Last Mosh is a free all metal party that turns up the volume on some of the best live performances ever captured on camera, with Manchester’s metalheads invited to close Mosh Film Festival in the only way appropriate – by moshing out.

What's on at Cultplex

Where to go near Mosh Film Fest at Chapeltown Picture House

Cheetham Hill
Restaurant
Osaka Local

Wonderful Japanese street food vendor, often found at Grub and other street food events in and around Manchester and the North.

tours and activities guide
Cheetham Hill
Manchester Three Rivers Gin Distillery

Join the Gin renaissance with Manchester Three Rivers, a gin distillery situated in the heart of the Green Quarter making some fantastic gin as well as inviting people to get up close to the distillation process.

Manchester
Restaurant
Fairfield Social Club

Fairfield Social Club is a multi-purpose site next to Angel Meadows Park in the Green Quarter, ran by the team behind the much-loved Grub,.

Popup Bikes
Manchester
Café or Coffee Shop
Popup Bikes

Independently-run coffee shop and bike repair shop on the edge of the Green Quarter in Manchester.

Manchester
Event venue
Partisan

Partisan is a Manchester-based collective and volunteer-run space for independent, community led, DIY and cultural based projects. They have two floors for events, meetings, office space, live music, club nights, and art.

Salford
Gallery
1520 Studios

1520 Studios is bigger than a film and photography studio, also functioning as an event space and community hub.

Cheetham Hill
The Yard

New creative hub The Yard is home to a great little music venue, which tends to attract future-leaning electronic artists.

The exterior of The Pilcrow
Manchester
Bar or Pub
Sadler’s Cat

The Pilcrow is now Sadler’s Cat, a contemporary community pub at the heart of the NOMA neighbourhood. Overlooking Sadler’s Yard.

What's on: Cinema

Culture Guides

Exhibitions in the North

Galleries around the North are gearing up for a new season of exhibitions - from iconic art prizes to smaller, artist-led gems.

Cinema in the North

This month we recommend a season of Film noir, cult Australian movies and a huge celebration of DIY community cinema.

Theatre in Manchester and the North
Theatre in the North

This season’s theatre is gloriously eclectic: from radical cabaret and reinvented classics to new musicals and boundary-pushing performance.

Wisp Press Image
Music in the North

From corrupted shoegaze to experimental electronica, post-hardcore to Indian classical, these are the shows that should be on your radar.