“Rave on” in the cinema – the club is at home

Kosmo (Aaron Altaras) is techno-DJ, at least he was, also quite disillusioned, maybe depressed, perhaps suicidal, we do not learn more precisely, but something drives the young man, forces him to get a mission at least: he wants to hand over his latest work to his DJ-Idol Troy Porter: a plate with “his track”. And all of this is in a hurry, it has to happen that night, in this club, in which Porter is putting on – the film “Rave on”, which starts in German cinemas this Thursday, Kosmo follows through this “Night of the Nights” at every step and, as the two directors Viktor Jakovleski (“Surf Berlin”) and Nikias Chrysssos (“The Bunker”, “A Pure Place”) explain, “In terms of space, Guerillastyle turned on two self -organized, real techno parties.” The soundtrack comes from Ed Davenport, even DJ in the “Berghain” in Berlin. The semi-documentary approach can be noticed by the film, you occasionally forget that you are in the cinema and not at the techno party that you are currently attending.

“Otherwise I stop,” I can no longer, “Kosmo threatens the bouncer, whom he knows from the past and who wants to send him home. Whether this means the music or life remains as unclear as the question of whether this is a big difference. In any case, “Life” in “Rave On” is a club night in a technical and protagonist Kosmo fights for his increasingly existential mission: the record has to go to the DJ.

He will be left in the club, soon served the first drink, although he actually didn’t want to drink: “You don’t stop it soberly,” explains the bar woman. Kosmo is not available in the backstage area, and until Porter plays, five hours have to be brought around. All good intentions go with the first shot, and with these first sequences, an atmosphere full of ambivalences is created. Somehow the club is at home, everything is familiar with Kosmo, he has done it all a hundred times, dancing, drinking, consuming drugs. But he doesn’t feel really comfortable here, and we as a spectator can feel the discomfort. The club world and the celebrating people are often hard and condescending, at some point Kosmo will be cheered by a group of Yuppies who do something with “import and export” instead of coke and driven into full crash. He becomes a mockery: “What a freak.”

The world that is shown here is not a friendly, the escapism of the Technoclub parallel world is deconstructed: the techno scene reproduces the late capitalist misery from which the party goers actually want to flee; And without drugs, neither one nor the other can be endured. So far, so trivial. But these relationships only form the setting for what “rave on” is really interested in, namely how art, as much as it is deformed and captured by the conditions, arouses human passion, as everything else doesn’t matter. Because Kosmo is not about money or fame. Art is something bigger, something that allows people to grow beyond their physicality and function as a value producer, goods and drug consumers. “This plate no longer belongs to you. It belongs to the world, ”explains Porter Kosmo in a drug hallucination and on his begging, returning the plate to him. “But it’s my record, I did the tracks. She belongs to me, “replies Porter succinctly:” As soon as I play her and the world receives it, she belongs. “

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Ultimately, Kosmo comes out of this trip, which is more nightmare than fantastic, not as a winner or hero, but as an artist. After all, he meets, somewhat outgraded, the young woman, whom he met somewhere on the go and quickly lost again, and Porter actually plays his record. And now the broken hero finally dances and shines.

The drugs, the functional drive disposal sex in Dark Rooms, but also the hero worship, all the scene folklore take a back seat, become crazy backdrop in »Rave on«. The people around Kosmo are not interested in the film as an executor of any scene conventions or as a recipient for all sorts of paying audiences, not as consumers, but as relevant recipients for the success of art. »Techno arises from collective experiences. A collective of people. A collective origin, «says Porter. Kleug has been observed that the art of “sucking” people despite the art experience that Porter puts it into a collective makes it a collective, even in intoxication and ecstasy. But how should you? “Rave on” presents the drug frenzy, the adult ecstatic, the intoxicating escalation and the catastrophic potential that the frenzy also carries, but not as a problem, because in the club and in the film people are quite close and compassionate. The problematic developments are more related to the development of the scene towards a mainstream phenomenon, these changes are discussed in the film several times.

The directors Jakovleski and Chryssos are rooted in the scene themselves and have made a critical homage worth seeing with “Rave on”.

“Rave on”, Germany 2025. Director and book: Nikias Chryssos, Viktor Jakovleski. With: Aaron Altaras, Clemens Schick, Ruby Commey, Hieroglyphic Being. 81 min.