Richie Hawtin's short film returns to a 1994 Detroit warehouse party

A new short film puts a camera inside the kind of Detroit techno night that, by design, almost no one ever recorded.

Kids Like Us is streaming on NOWNESS. Written and directed by Michigan filmmaker Luke Jaden and executive produced by Richie Hawtin, it was shot on 35mm Kodak film and runs about nine minutes, per Resident Advisor. The story follows a group of young misfits finding their way into the city's underground electronic scene in the early 1990s.

The film is built around a real night. On August 13, 1994, Hawtin threw a party called Spastik inside the abandoned Packard Plant, and it doubled as the first live performance of his Plastikman project. That date is the anchor here, with the film marking 30 years since the party and the debut of the alias.

Jaden did not just stage the scene. He shot at an actual techno party in Detroit and pulled detail from interviews with people who were there, so the night on screen reads as documentary as much as drama. The 35mm grain does a lot of the work. A version captured in clean digital would look like a recreation; the film stock makes it feel like a memory, which is the point.

The party itself has become part of techno's origin story. Daniel Miller of Mute Records, Hawtin's label, made the trip to the Packard Plant, and a young raver who would later perform as The Blessed Madonna was in the crowd.

Hawtin has framed the era as something that only looks historic in hindsight. "We weren't thinking we were creating history, but that's what we were doing, building the narrative, building the manual of what techno is about," he told HERO.

Kids Like Us is available to watch on NOWNESS and YouTube.