It's All Gone Pete Tong

Michael Dowse's It's All Gone Pete Tong (the title is Cockney rhyming slang for "it's all gone wrong") premiered at the 2004 Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the prize for Best Canadian Feature Film. A Canada and UK co-production set in the Balearic clubland of Ibiza, it arrived just as dance culture was cresting in the mainstream, and it turned the era's hedonism into something much stranger and sadder than a party movie.

Dowse builds it as a faux-documentary, with talking-head interviews from real scene figures, among them the broadcaster Pete Tong as himself, and it rests almost entirely on Paul Kaye as the fictional DJ Frankie Wilde. Kaye, best known in Britain for his prank persona Dennis Pennis, plays the descent with a raw physical commitment that startled critics: vain and monstrous one moment, stripped bare the next. The highs are shot with strobing, hallucinatory energy (a recurring drug-badger included), and the silence of encroaching deafness with sudden, disorienting restraint.

It won Best Actor and Best Feature at the US Comedy Arts Festival and drew eight Genie nominations, including Best Picture, Director and Actor, before settling into life as a cult favourite passed around among dance-music fans. It sits somewhere between satire and tragedy, and very few films have taken the culture of the superclub seriously enough to break its heart.