Evacuating during the 2025 Los Angeles Palisades wildfire director Tamra Davis found a box of her old tapes she took when on tour with her partner from the Beastie Boys and decided to go through them and put something together. Despite how this documentary has been pitched, she doesn’t even talk to anyone who organised the festival or indeed never actually interviewed anyone outside of the headliners when the festival was on back in the day.

Kathleen Hanna does look really cute asking people questions after they read their responses to the warm-up ones that were written on a back of a boarding pass. Dave Ghrol holding up a smoke in one hand a bottle of wine in this other when he is asked how he maintained his voice on tour is a highlight.

I was at the Summersault festival in Melbourne and it did seem pretty undersold compared to what I had heard of how busy the Big Day Out was at the same venue or even Pushover I had been to previously at the Docklands before it was developed. There were a lot of sideshows for this festival and I even rang up the presenter on JJJ FM to talk to them about going to the festival.

I would go down on the train straight to the festival and get the key out of the letterbox at my uncle’s place and sleep on the couch. Ended up sleeping on the floor in a swag when I first moved to Melbourne for work. I did not get to see Ella Hooper at the first Pushover I always regretted it. Considering Summersault was my second festival it kind of ruined other festivals for me, too high bar for the line-up!

While the Summersault section of this seems alright (despite the lack of headliners or people who actually ran the festival involvement) the “rest of South East Asia” didn’t really amount to much. Typical yank attitude “the rest of the world” is everything not in the USA! Hardly needed to see the Beastie Boys smoking a hash pipe in a Bangkok hotel room to establish their bad boy credentials!

It’s good enough for what is and another documentary that is really only possible due to having the footage otherwise it would be “Ken Burns effect” on the photos and a lot of talking heads and quite possibly fuckin’ BONO for some reason!

Film details:

Director: Tamra Davis

Producer: Tamra Davis, Shelby Meade, Linda Lichter

Cinematographer: Tamra Davis

Composer: Very Nice Person: Editor

Jessica Hernandez

Featured Subjects: Beck, Dave Grohl, Beastie Boys, Rancid, Foo Fighters, Sonic Youth, Kathleen Hanna, Kim Gordon, Pavement, The Amps and Bikini Kill.

Year: 2025

Length: 84 mins

Countries: Philippines, USA, Thailand, Australia, Indonesia

Language: English

Genre: Documentary, Music

Victorian Premiere

Trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAkpUYm60pY