‘Eno’ Documentary Streaming Debut Is a 24-Hour Event With Multiple Versions and Surprise Guests

“Eno” was already a groundbreaking documentary, as the first non-fiction feature film to screen in a different randomly-generated version each showing. But since its January premiere at Sundance, the documentary about the music and creative process of Brian Eno has only been available to screen at special roadshow theatrical engagements — from which it has grossed nearly a million dollars so far.

Now Gary Hustwit‘s technologically innovative doc will be available to viewers at home for the first time in a special 24-hour livestream with multiple versions of the film about the British musician and producer who played with Roxy Music and worked with David Bowie, the Talking Heads and U2. Special surprise guests will drop by the livestream to perform and give talks, and the stream will also incorporate the generative art prequel piece “Nothing Can Ever Be the Same” that showed at the Venice Biennale.

“You see unique versions of it at different times around the clock,” says Hustwit. “So people in other countries and in Asia and all the places that have been bugging us about setting up events in their cities can all watch.”

“Every few hours there’ll be a version of the film, but there’ll be all kinds of things in between,” says Hustwit. “You could dip in, watch a version in the morning, go to work, come back, watch another one in the middle of the night.”

Just 24,000 tickets to the 24-hour livestream on Jan. 24 will be released, at a ticket price of $24.

“We’ve got a very experimental approach with the film and this is one of the things we get to do — try new things,” says Hustwit.

Hustwit, the director of acclaimed documentaries like “Helvetica,” pioneered a unique approach with “Eno” that recombines more than 500 hours of footage into a different 84-minute version each time it’s watched. It’s not a technology that readily translates to selling the rights to a streaming service. Still, Hustwit says he’s working on bringing dynamically-generated movies to streaming, not just “Eno” but projects from other filmmakers too.

“The industry, especially the documentary industry, just needs a little bit of of shaking up, and we can try new things. It’s definitely like the distribution system is broken now. So why not mix things up and try something new?” he says.

“I think that functionality is something that the streamers will have to adopt soon, with all the disruption that’s happening and will continue to happen,” Hustwit predicts.