Stacey Lee's documentary spends a festival season inside the electronic dance scene, using access to touring DJs to examine who gets billed at the top of a lineup and why.
What is Underplayed about?
Underplayed follows a touring season across summer festivals to look at gender inequality within electronic dance music, tracking how few women appear near the top of major lineups despite the genre's global reach. The film draws on access to working DJs and producers, including Anna Lunoe, Nervo and Nightwave, to build a picture of an industry where visibility and opportunity have long skewed toward men. Rather than treating the imbalance as an abstract statistic, the documentary follows its subjects through the routines of touring and performing, letting their working lives make the argument.
About the cast
Anna Lunoe, Nervo and Nightwave appear throughout as the film's central voices, each drawn from the touring circuit the documentary follows. Their presence anchors the film in lived experience rather than commentary from outside the scene.
Context & significance
Directed by Stacey Lee and shot over a festival season, Underplayed runs 88 minutes and sits within a small but growing body of music documentaries built around a single industry's internal politics rather than a single artist's biography. Filmed on the festival circuit, it uses touring life as its structure, following its subjects from stage to stage rather than building around interviews shot in isolation. Its 2020 catalogue year places it alongside a wave of documentaries examining representation across music genres more broadly. A Canadian production, the film brings an outside vantage point to a scene whose biggest stages are usually found elsewhere, which shapes how its subjects talk about access and visibility.
Watching Underplayed on Ktime
Underplayed is available to stream on K-Time with a free account login, and the page itself carries no cost to browse. K-Time's Farsi-language interface makes it straightforward for Persian-speaking viewers to find music documentaries like this one alongside the rest of the catalogue.