Hot Docs

“We came out of this destruction… this very empty city,” explains Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth in Celine Danhier’s upbeat, thoroughly informative, and entertaining documentary about New York City’s No Wave scene of the late 1970s and its evolution into the Cinema of Transgression of the early 1980s. A rollicking recollection of a cultural rebellion, Blank City recounts how the artistic denizens of the bombed-out Lower East Side spawned both punk rock and what came to be known as “independent film.” Peppered with rare clips and home movie footage, as well as outrageous anecdotes from such key players as Jim Jarmusch, Debbie Harry, Amos Poe, Steve Buscemi, John Lurie, Susan Seidelman, John Waters and Lydia Lunch, Blank City constructs a captivating oral history about a time when, as Lurie explains, “we were writing the rules, and trying to break a few at the same time.”

Media Coverage

CityNews (Capsule Review), [Eye Weekly](http://www.eyeweekly.com/article/893590 (4-star Review)