A film about the fans instead of the band

The Posters Came from the Walls is probably the best depiction of 'fanhood' on film I've ever seen.  There is little to no footage of the actual members of Depeche Mode - other than a few clips of bootlegged video. Instead, grip it surveys a bewildering range of Depeche Mode devotees from Tehran, to Romania, Los Angeles, London & St. Petersburg.   People who treat the lyrics as transcendental poetry, one man who was homeless for 5 years listening to the 101 album on tape on his little box everyday till going to a DM concert got him back into society, others for whom it represented freedom from the iron wall, a fervent few who worship in goth churches where the songs are listened to as hymns. I HAD NO IDEA.

Who wasn't a Depeche Mode fan in 1987? At least if you were remotely into cultivating an intellectual/individualist brand for your highschool outcast self.  But the fact there are teenagers in Pasadena  today who worship, as in actually light incense everyday, in front of a Depeche Mode poster, that's some kind of testimony to the music.  The filmmakers were in the house at  Cinefamily @ The Silent Movie Theater where it screened last night and succeeded in presenting these fans as moving, 3 dimensional people and not as freaks on parade (although the family that dresses up in robes every weekend and films themselves to DM music came close).  The name "The Posters Came from the Walls" is from a description an East German fan gives to seeing a DM concert for the first time after the Wall fell - he said, before that, living in a totalitarian state, you never expected to have the chance of seeing your heroes in real life, but going to that concert was a radical experience - it was the first time his posters came alive.