What is the single best house documentary?

If you only watch one, make it Pump Up the Volume: The History of House Music, the 2001 Channel 4 film directed by Carl Hindmarch. Twenty-five years on it is still the definitive telling, two and a half hours that run from Chicago's warehouses to acid house and the global explosion, with the people who were actually there, Frankie Knuckles, Jamie Principle and many more, speaking for themselves. Everything else builds on the foundation it lays.

What are the five best house music documentaries?

1. Pump Up the Volume: The History of House Music (2001). The complete arc of the genre, told by its founders. The one to start with.

2. Maestro (2003). The New York origin story, centred on the Paradise Garage, Larry Levan and David Mancuso's Loft, the disco temples whose marathon, communal nights became the blueprint for house.

3. Everybody in the Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992 (2018). Artist Jeremy Deller, lecturing a classroom of teenagers, reframes the UK acid-house and rave wave as social and political history, set against Thatcher, the miners' strike and a changing Britain. Unlike anything else on this list.

4. I Was There When House Took Over the World (2017). A return to the source: Chicago's pioneers and the producers behind the foundational tracks, telling the early scene in their own words.

5. Above & Beyond: The Global Rise of Afro House (2023). Proof the story did not stop in the 20th century, tracing Afro house through Johannesburg, Berlin, Luanda and Nairobi and the artists carrying the sound now.

Which others are worth watching?

A few more belong on any serious shelf. High Tech Soul (2006) covers Detroit techno and the Belleville Three, house's closest cousin. A Trip Around Acid House (1988) is a raw time capsule of London's first acid summer. Rave & Resistance (2019) digs into club culture in post-apartheid Johannesburg, and Come As You Are (2017) is an intimate portrait of David Mancuso's Loft and its dancers. Together they fill in the corners Pump Up the Volume could not.