Eno (2024)
Director: Gary Hustwit Run Time: 85 min. Rating: NR Release Year: 2024
Starring: Bono, Brian Eno, Chris Martin, David Bowie, David Byrne
Country: United States
Language: English
About the film:
World Premiere, 2024 Sundance Film Festival.
Visionary musician and artist Brian Eno — known for producing David Bowie, U2, Talking Heads, among many others; pioneering the genre of ambient music; and releasing more than 40 solo and collaboration albums — reveals his creative processes in Eno, directed by acclaimed filmmaker Gary Hustwit.
“DAZZLING. More than a biographical documentary, ENO emerges as a brilliant and endlessly inspiring creative manifesto.”
—Manuel Betancourt, A/V Club
In the first career-spanning documentary of the legendary and prolific artist and the world’s first generative feature film, Hustwit set out to decode Eno’s creative strategies and examine his lifelong search for the meaning of music. Defying the hagiographic impulses of the music doc genre, Eno draws from original interviews and the artist’s own staggering archive of never-before-seen footage and unreleased music, as well as Hustwit’s original interviews.
Utilizing a proprietary software system developed by Hustwit and digital artist Brendan Dawes, Eno offers millions of possible variations and ushers in a groundbreaking approach to storytelling. The result is a viewing experience that resonates with Eno’s own artistic practice, his use of technology to compose music, and the mercurial essence of creativity as his endless pursuit.
About the filmmaker:
Gary Hustwit is a filmmaker and visual artist based in New York. He has produced over 20 documentaries and film projects, including the award-winning I Am Trying To Break Your Heart (2002) about the band Wilco; Oddsac (2010), an experimental feature film by the band Animal Collective; and Mavis! (2015), the HBO documentary about gospel/soul music legend Mavis Staples. Hustwit worked with punk label SST Records in the late-1980s, releasing the music of bands like Black Flag, Sonic Youth, and Dinosaur Jr. He ran the independent book publishing house Incommunicado Press during the 1990s, and started the DVD label Plexifilm in 2001. With Plexifilm, Hustwit released over 40 films theatrically and on home video, including work by the Maysles brothers, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Andy Warhol and David Byrne.
In 2007, he made his directorial debut with Helvetica, the world’s first feature-length documentary about graphic design and typography. He has continued to explore how design affects our daily lives with his subsequent films Objectified (2009), Urbanized (2011), Workplace (2016), and Rams (2018). His most recent feature film is Eno (2024), a documentary about musician and artist Brian Eno, which uses generative technology in its creation and exhibition.
Hustwit’s films have premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, the South by Southwest Film Festival, and the Toronto International Film Festival, among others. He was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Helvetica, and has served on the grand juries of the Sundance Film Festival, the IFP Gotham Awards, and the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. Gary was named one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company. He is a member of the Documentary Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
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