UNTIL THE LIGHT TAKES US Documentary Competition

In 1991 , Norwegian churches started to burn, just after on underground scene of anti consumerist metal
musicians had begun to jell. While reporters and police scrambled for answers, more and more churches
went up in flames. They had no leads until Varg Vikernes, one of the architects of an underground
music-art-political scene known as “black metal,” took credit. He was held for questioning long enough
for the media to run with a largely fabricated story of satanic rituals, abductions and sacrifices. Soon,
other young men took those media cues, creating on escalating cycle of fiction-fueled reality. This feature
documentary unearths the real story of black metal, a movement and music genre led by metal musicians,
murderers, church burners and suicide victims. The film examines the birth and explosive arc of black
metal from the perspective of the musicians, young men who tried to change the world using music
and symbolic acts of violence. Part modern-art splinter group, part terrorist movement and part rock scene,
this underground assemblage has become increasingly commercially successful and infamous, its music
available in record stores, profiled in Spin and Rolling Stone and even serving as the inspiration for
popular animated shows in the US.