“The music documentaries I’ve seen are never really about the music,” says Hendrik Willemyns, of venerated Belgian electro-indie duo Arsenal. “They’re about people, history and stories. But they don’t really go into the darkness that music is or can be."

“Music used to be this force that would shape people’s minds, politically and philosophically”

Sidestepping a typical music-film format, Willemyns and partner John Roan enlisted the help of Johnny Whitney, vocalist of cult American post-hardcore band The Blood Brothers, to co-write a series of short stories, and find a way to describe the experience of their music and 2014 album Furu – without using interviews or archival footage. The result is Dance! Dance! Dance!, a feature-length film that tells the story of an aspiring Japanese DJ, directed by Ken Ochiai and Willemyns, and starring Dean Fujioka and Ayumi Ito, a local TV star who also featured in Michel Gondry’s Tokyo!

“Music used to be this force that would shape people’s minds, politically and philosophically,” says Willemyns, who performed the film’s score live at the Film Fest Ghent premiere. “It would be this gateway to the world and it has lost that power, the internet has taken over that.”

Dance! Dance! Dance! plays at Spot Festival, Aarhus, Denmark Friday May 1.