It has no release date just yet, but it’s time to start getting excited over the new L7 documentary, Pretend We’re Dead. Directed by Sarah Price and funded in part by a successful Kickstarter campaign, the in-depth look at the pioneering Los Angeles rock band released its first trailer this week, and it packs a wallop.
The teaser clip features contributions from Krist Novoselic, Shirley Manson, and 7 Year Bitch’s Valerie Agnew, and takes us back to the early- and mid-’90s when L7 shook up the male-dominated music industry. The doc takes its name from a song on L7’s 1992 album Bricks Are Heavy.
“It’s got some gender politics in it, it’s got friendship issues in it,” L7 frontwoman Donita Sparks told Vanyaland in an extended August interview. “It’s got the struggle of what we went through to get there and then to lose it. Also, a lot of the footage is really funny. It’s us being us, away from the media.”
Sparks said she contributed a decent amount of footage to the documentary, and she and the band gave Price their blessing.
“We had all of this home movie footage,” Sparks said, “and I was like, ‘How do we want to deal with this? I’m sure fans want to see it. I’d like to see it edited together somehow.’ And I was talking about it at dinner with Sarah the director, and she said she wanted to see the footage, and she really liked it. She had some gaps to fill in because our original video camera was stolen, so there were some years that were not captured which had to be filled in with photographs. I’ve been feeding her photos and all kinds of press clips. I’ve been kind of taking it on myself to provide her with the content for the whole thing. We all did separate interviews, and I’ve been approving things here and there, but it’s overall her trip.”
The documentary reportedly sifts through more than 100 hours of archive footage, with commentary by Joan Jett, Bratmobile’s Allison Wolfe, Louise Post of Veruca Salt, and the members of L7. “They were openly, brazenly feminist, and I really responded to that,” Manson says in the clip. Watch it below.