MOSH Film Fest at CULTPLEX
Tom Grieve, Cinema Editor
The metal-est film festival in Manchester is back this April as Mosh invites headbangers from across the city to gather at CULTPLEX. Whatever your favourite sub-genre, Mosh Film Fest aims to celebrate all corners of heavy metal, with a diverse, inclusive line-up of movies ranging from tried and tested classics, to bleeding edge contemporary releases.
Spread over the weekend of Saturday 13 – Sunday 14 April, the festival blends documentary and fiction features for a programme that pays tribute to the real lives and true spirit of metal. Across the line-up there’s a focus on films featuring and made by people from backgrounds underrepresented in metal — a focus in-keeping with Mosh’s mission to provide a fun, loud and inclusive space for fans.
On the documentary front, audiences can look forward to the evocatively-titled Stabbed in the Face, about extreme deathmatch wrestling metal band, Eat the Turnbuckle. The Sound of Scars is billed as harrowing yet beautiful as it tells the story of New York hardcore legends Life Of Agony — a band led by the very first openly transgender singer in the genre.
a focus in-keeping with Mosh’s mission to provide a fun, loud and inclusive space for fans
With Sirens, director Rita Baghdadi follows the first and only all-woman thrash metal band in the Middle East against a backdrop of political unrest in Beirut. Meanwhile The Godfathers of Hardcore is an intimate invitation into the lives of hardcore punk legends, Roger Miret and Vinnie Stigma of Agnostic Front.
On a more fantastical note, 80s cult animation Heavy Metal draws from its comic book source for an anthology featuring hard-boiled space travel, dark fantasy, horror and eroticism with a soundtrack featuring Black Sabbath, Blue Öyster Cult and Nazareth. Sillier still, 1994’s Airheads features Brendan Fraser, Adam Sandler and Steve Buscemi (alongside Primus, Motorhead and Anthrax) as wannabe rockers who accidentally hold up a Los Angeles radio station.
There’s more than just feature films on offer at Mosh. The event opens with a Heavy Shorts Mixtape which gathers some of the most inventive metal shorts, docs and music videos submitted to the festival. While there’s also a chance to work your pipes as Mosh hands the mic to the audience for Kerrang!-eoke — a Saturday night of singalongs, headbanging and (much) more screaming than your average karaoke.
