Strobe Music Film Festival

Overview

When Sydney Film Festival arrives each year, do you spend all of your time seeing flicks in the Sounds on Screen strand, the event's home for movies about music? If so, then you also need to make a date with Strobe Music Film Festival. Now in its fifth year, the latter takes place out of Golden Age Cinema and Bar — and it's back for 2025 with a six-film lineup.

Kicking off on Friday, August 29 at Surry Hills' beloved boutique cinema — and playing flicks that all boast impressive soundtracks — Strobe is opening with Goddess of Slide: The Forgotten Story of Ellen McIlwaine, about the Canadian slide guitarist and singer who opened for the likes of Odetta and Jimi Hendrix.

Dates vary until Sunday, September 7, but Electronic Body Music will take you inside industrial music's evolution through post-punk to dance floors, I Can't Be Anyone But Me is all about on Big Mama Thornton and Oscar Peterson: Black + White puts the eponymous jazz pianist in the spotlight.

If you missed the Conway Brothers-focused Whoopee Blues at the 2025 Antenna Film Festival, this is your next chance to see it. And, you can also catch Radio On, showing 45 years after its initial Sydney screening back in 1980.