a film by Beth B

"Beth B's documentary on the singer/provocateur/No Wave icon looks, sounds and feels like a Lydia Lunch song: raw, loud, unfiltered and unflinching."

— Rolling Stone

"Refreshingly, the documentary isn't a retrospective of Lunch's former glory, but a celebration of her still-active artistry, looking at her band Teenage Jesus & the Jerks, her cinematic  collaborations with Richard Kern, and her recent Retrovirus tour. After nearly five decades on  the stage, she shows no signs of waning, and exudes a gravitas earned over time."
— Hyperallergic

"A bracing reminder that sexual self-defense can take many forms...it chronicles how Lunch embarked on a series of musical reinventions. Viewers will marvel at a woman who, at 60, seems just as fierce as she was 40 years ago."

— The Hollywood Reporter

"A wild and impactful documentary...Portrait of a punk priestess, through its feminist  commitment, its avant-garde music and its nihilistic poetry."

— Tèlèrama

Lydia Lunch: The War is Never Over traces Lunch's beginnings in the late 1970s New York City  downtown scene with her band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, a central pillar of the No Wave  music movement, and follows her storied career as an artist and legendary spoken-word poet - touching on her many collaborations with a diverse collective of artists, writers and musicians  including Alan Vega (Suicide), Hubert Selby Jr., and Nick Cave and Sonic Youth. The film  blends interviews with Lydia and those in her circle with archival footage of 1970's bands and photographs of New York City along with contemporary on-stage performances by Lunch. 

"Lydia Lunch was 19 and I was 23 when we met in the late '70s New York music/film/art scene  and brought our radical visions to the underground where we broke boundaries, simultaneously  shocking and enticing our audiences with our uncensored music and films," says Beth B in her  director's statement. "Fast forward to 2017, as I watched the ever brash and luminous Lydia Lunch performing with her extraordinary band, RETROVIRUS, I realized that I needed to make  the definitive documentary about [her]."

Beth B is an award-winning director of independent feature-length documentary and narrative films whose career focuses on recasting and redefining concepts relating to the mind, the body  and women's issues. Controversial and political in approach and content, her recent films have been shown at venues including the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art along  with festivals including Sundance, Berlin Film Festival, Toronto Film Festival, SXSW and  Locarno Film Festival. She has also served on the competition juries at the Sundance and Toronto Film Festivals.