Film: Efterklang, An Island

“It is not a documentary; it is not a long music video,” says Efterklang’s Rasmus Stolberg of a new film about the band. He’s right: An Island (available today on DVD or as a digital download package), gives you a better sense of the group than any album or interview could capture. What makes it different, though, is how they’ve shared it with fans.

In February and March Efterklang offered ‘private-public screenings’ to anyone willing to show the album-length film at a venue of their choice — be it a café, a library or even your sitting room — as long as a minimum audience of five people and free admission were guaranteed. Hosts downloaded the film as a high quality file while prospective audience members could attend by choosing from a list of locations posted on the film’s official website.

To put it to the test, a group of us borrowed a big screen and a projector before setting everything up in at a music studio. At first it felt like a fitting venue, but after three hours of struggling to set up the audio-visuals and dragging furniture in, the wine and biscuits had been all but finished and two people prematurely called it a night.

Then the lights dimmed. The film rumbled to life slowly, throbbing through the speakers as the eight-piece indie ensemble sail across the Baltic Sea to the Danish island of Als, where they grew up.

We see Efterklang harmonise on the back of a truck ploughing through a forest, jam with their parents in the band’s old rehearsal space and rope a hall full of children into providing percussion — all interspersed with subdued recollections of the band’s childhood friendships.

The man behind the camera is experimental French director Vincent Moon, who excels at capturing moments with intimate close-angles and improvised fluidity — an art he mastered through his series of online music vignettes, The Take Away Shows, as well as his documentaries with Arcade Fire, Mogwai and The National.

An Island, trailer

Those huddled together at our late-night screening were either vaguely familiar with the band or not at all, yet the novelty of the screening enticed them, revealing a side to Efterklang’s elegiac pop sing-alongs that few could resist being charmed by.

“Something happens when you watch films with other people,” says Stolberg, Efterklang’s bassist and manager. “There is a focus on the piece — a focus that you don’t find so much in rock music.”

The idea of the screenings, Stolberg explains, came about when the band wanted to get the film shown at festivals only to realise they didn’t know how. Letting fans decide when and where to watch it seemed like an easy solution, but the band didn’t expect to stumble on a new distribution and marketing model. The idea caught on so quickly that there were 1178 screenings around the world within weeks.

The atmosphere the screenings create stems from Moon’s filmmaking, which makes you feel like you’re sharing a private moment, forgetting that thousands are watching the same thing simultaneously.

Currently filming a fan-funded music project in Columbia, Moon says the response to An Island has convinced him that ‘private-public screenings’ are the way forward. His newly launched website and label, Petites Planetes, aims to uncover diverse sounds and cultures from around the world, allowing fans to screen every film Moon has ever made whatever way they want.

“It opens horizons” says Moon. “I hope it inspires people to try new things and not respect too much the official way of releasing films or music.”

Documentary site here. Host/attend a screening of one of Vincent Moon’s movies here.

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