Tony Cokes’s SM BNGRZ 3 considers club culture as a space where collective life, desire and liberation can be rehearsed through music, movement and shared presence. Drawing on voices and texts reflecting on queer nightlife and rave culture in the aftermath of the pandemic, the film asks what is at stake when the possibility of gathering together is interrupted or made precarious.

Cokes combines fragments of language with music, colour and typography, creating a charged interplay between image, sound and text. New Order tracks and MFA Dance tracks accompany dialogues concerned with the value of physical, communal space and the enduring human desire to be among others. The result moves between melancholy and resilience: a work shaped by both the memory of collective experience and a determination not to lose it.

The film foregrounds the particular importance of clubs and raves to queer and marginalised communities, where social hierarchies and everyday prejudices can be temporarily suspended and alternative forms of belonging made possible. Yet this liberation is not automatic; the work also considers the exclusions and inequalities that persist within these spaces, and the responsibility of communities to actively cultivate more open and inclusive environments.

Against an increasingly mediated social world, SM BNGRZ 3 proposes collective gathering itself as an enduring technology of resistance. Its combination of language and music becomes both reflection and rallying cry: a plea to protect the physical spaces in which people can meet, move, desire and imagine forms of freedom together.