It's All Gone Pete Tong

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

The film is built as a faux-documentary, complete with talking-head interviews from real scene figures including the broadcaster Pete Tong as himself, and rests almost entirely on Paul Kaye's performance as the fictional DJ Frankie Wilde. Kaye, best known in Britain as the prank persona Dennis Pennis, plays the descent with a raw physical commitment that startled critics — vain and monstrous one moment, stripped bare the next. Dowse shoots the highs 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 between dance-music fans. Pitched somewhere between satire, tragedy and redemption story, it remains one of the few films to take the culture of the superclub seriously enough to break its heart.