Still: Club Heaven - Jona Honer

The opening scene of Club Heaven, set inside The Playhouse in Chengdu, China - one of the world’s most exclusive cathedrals of EDM - immediately showcases its owners’ taste for excess. As a lighting rig is lowered down onto the stage of the club, the whole process resembles more the arrival of the Mother Ship in Close Encounters. 

Of course, the display of wealth doesn’t stop there. There may be drinks other than champagne on offer, but everybody seems to want the fizzy stuff, and to pay exorbitantly for the privilege.

“I think the film is more like a metaphor for a contemporary ritual,” Dutch director Jona Honer explains to SEE NL.

“I think in a world where belief systems are not that structured anymore, in a sense there is a very strict belief system within this club. People are looking for ways to come together to celebrate and confirm their values.” 

The club’s devotees are the so-called Fuerdai - young Chinese 20-somethings with vast amounts of inherited wealth. “A big part [of the experience] is also the transcendence of objects, such as the champagne,” Honer adds of the bubbly beverage which is delivered in imperial style within an Ace of Spade-shaped casket, as if to a waiting Caesar or Cleopatra. What’s more, paper money is ritually distributed from a balcony, à la Rome in all its decadence. 

Club Heaven may be a film that embraces EDM, but there is barely any music to be heard. When we see the clubbers, it is in total silence, and as if to underscore their wealth-fuelled detachment, they are filmed through a thermal camera, rendering them in monochrome, like ghostly negatives of themselves.

Honer offers a further reason for the use of thermal vison. “It's a conceptual film. We all look at reality and we see it as we know it. But I think my task as an artist and filmmaker is, especially if you see documentary as an art form, to give the viewer a different way of looking at what they might already know,” he says.

“There were many reasons why I shot it in thermal inside the club but I think maybe the most important is that it emphasises for me the ritualistic aspect of it all. Because you come to see it as one moving body instead of individual people.”

That said, when we go behind the scenes to meet the club’s staff, they are presented in full colour, and are chatty and expressive. We see them eating in the staff canteen, or collecting champagne for delivery to the clubbers, or operating the accounts and ticketing systems. Some of the female staff are chided for not looking groovy enough, and a manager reminds them that they are working at the club to increase profits. If they fail to do so, they are told, they will be replaced by a younger generation of workers.

Honer shot the film over a two-month period, going to the club every night. After a while, the staff got used to his presence, and that of his Chinese sound recordist, which is why they talk and act so candidly. 

Club Heaven is produced by Submarine’s Femke Wolting and Bruno Felix, with a creative producer credit going to Katja Draaijer who brought the project over from Baldr Film, where she was previously a partner. Co-Producer is Hanne Phlypo of Clin d’oeil. The project received support from the Netherlands Film Fund.

The Dutch director is delighted that his film will world-premiere at Visions du Réel, one of his favourite festivals, and whose approach to doc reminds him of the principles set out in Werner Herzog’s Minnesota Declaration. “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth,” Honer quotes Herzog. “It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.”

“I think I'm more drawn to the poetic, as well, so yeah, I think Visions is the perfect fit for this film,” Honer signs off.

Find out more about Visions du Réel here.