Hardcore Never Dies

The gabber scene in nineties Holland. For a group of young people in Rotterdam, music, identity and escape are the same thing. The central character moves from throwing parties into dealing, and as the scene grows so does the crime. Jim Taihuttu directed. The film looks at Holland's own subcultural history: gabber, a very fast and hard electronic genre taken up by the working-class youth of the period. The story follows the rise and fall template, with the crime film structure fitted onto the history of the scene. Music is at the centre and real tracks of the period are used; the party scenes are built through sound design. Taihuttu was known for Rabat and a colonial-era film; here he turns to entirely local material. It had limited distribution outside the Netherlands. Who it is for: viewers curious about music scene films and nineties subculture. Who it is not for: anyone after an original narrative; the structure is the familiar crime template.