Photo by Jeff Nelson, via the filmmakers.
There’s no lack of media chronicling D.C.’s storied punk scene—from numerous books and photo books to several documentaries—but we’re about to get another. Punk the Capital, a new film in the works that chronicles D.C.’s punk scene, is hoping to screen sometime in 2015.
While there’s already numerous documentaries that cover the history of harDCore in various capacities—Mandy Stein’s Bad Brains, A Band in DC, Jem Cohen’s Fugazi film Instrument, and American Hardcore, which devotes long segments to the D.C. scene—Punk the Capital promises to focus on the oft-overlooked early period between 1976 and 1985, with bands like The Slickee Boys, Urban Verbs, and Teen Idles.
Directors Paul Bishow and James Schneider says that the film, which is over ten years in the making, over 100 interviews with different people involved in the scene, as well as more than 200 hours of rare archival footage. Bishow and Schneider tell WAMU’s Bandwidth that they’re now in the final stages of completing the film, but are turning to Kickstarter to help raise $43,000 to finish it.
Punk the Capital is one of a several D.C. punk documentaries that are currently in the works. Director’s Jim Saah and Scott Crawford have their film, Salad Days: The D.C. Punk Revolution due out soon, and Robin Bell’s documentary on the activist punk collective Positive Force will be playing at the Maryland Film Festival this weekend. Meanwhile, D.C. scene expat Dave Grohl is supposedly making his own documentary on legendary recording studio Inner Ear and the D.C. punk scene for HBO.
Check out the trailer below: