UNTIL THE LIGHT TAKES US

(United States, 2008, 93 mins)

HDCAM

World Premiere

Producers: Audrey Ewell, Aaron Aites
Executive Producer: Gill Holland
Director of Photography: Audrey Ewell, Odd Reinhardt Nicolaysen
Editor: Andrew Ford
Music: Darkthrone, Mayhem, Burzum, Ulver, Thorns, Gorgoroth, Enslaved, Boards of Canada, Black Dice, Sunn 0))), Múm, J Lesser
Co-Editors: Audrey Ewell, Aaron Aites, Micheal Dimmitt, and Ulysses Guidotti
Assistant Editor: Jim Lopezzo
Additional Camera: Ellen Lande, John Harlow, and Aaron Aites

• www.myspace.com/blackmetalmovie

In 1991, Norwegian churches started to burn, just after an underground scene of anticonsumerist metal musicians had begun to gel. While reporters and police scrambled for answers, more and more churches went up in flames. They had no leads until Varg Vikernes, one of the architects of an underground music-art-political scene known as "black metal" took credit. He was held for questioning long enough for the media to run with a largely fabricated story of satanic rituals, abductions and sacrifices. Soon, other young men took those media cues, creating an escalating cycle of fiction-fueled reality. This feature documentary unearths the real story of black metal, a movement and music genre led by metal musicians, murderers, church burners and suicide victims. The film examines the birth and explosive arc of black metal from the perspective of the musicians, young men who tried to change the world using music and symbolic acts of violence. Part modern-art splinter group, part terrorist movement and part rock scene, this underground assemblage has become increasingly commercially successful and infamous, its music available in record stores, profiled in Spin and Rolling Stone and even serving as the inspiration for popular animated shows in the US.

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