We Are X

X Japan set off a musical revolution in Japan at the end of the eighties: melodic metal, theatrical staging and a look that shaped an entire generation. Yoshiki, the band's founder and drummer, is also its composer and the person running it. The band broke up in 1997 and reunited in 2007. The documentary opens the story backwards from the preparations for their concert at Madison Square Garden in New York in 2014. Stephen Kijak's film also tells Yoshiki's own life: losing his father to suicide when he was ten, the deaths of the band members hide and Taiji, and his own continuing health problems. The telling does not turn those losses into sensation; it holds the music and the mourning in the same sentence. The film screened at Sundance in 2016 and won the special jury award for editing. The effort to be recognised in the west is the film's other main line.