Rozz Williams: Romeo's Distress
The first comprehensive documentary portrait of the revolutionary artist and frontman of Christian Death, directed by his friend and collaborator Nico B.
Artist, poet, and musician Rozz Williams is mainly remembered as the founder and animating spirit of the band Christian Death, the main American pillar of "goth rock" (a label that Williams himself hated). Before and after his death at 34, Williams' music, writing, and work across the visual arts informed a nascent subcultural sensibility of transgression, darkness, and doomy appropriation of religious imagery. For almost a half-century, goth culture stereotypes have been borrowed for comedic mockery, public moralizing, and satanic-panic style crusades, but its enduring allure remains undeniable, and the cult of Rozz lives on, continually renewed by successive generations.
Assembled by Williams' close collaborator Nico B (co-director with Williams of the controversial short film Pig), Rozz Williams: Romeo's Distress unearths a trove of archival images and tracks down those who knew Rozz best in life, cementing his iconoclastic status and deepening the long shadow he casts over subcultures world-wide.
