Director: Omar Majeed, Peter Mishara
A movement that record executives once tried to declare dead gets a defiant, foot-stomping rebuttal in this documentary. Built from decades of archival footage and new interviews, it argues that the sound born on 1970s dancefloors never actually disappeared — it just changed its clothes.
What is Disco's Revenge about?
Rather than treating disco as a punchline or a nostalgia act, the film traces the genre back to its origins in underground clubs where marginalized communities, Black, Latino, and queer New Yorkers especially, built a sound and a culture out of necessity as much as celebration. Musicians, producers, and club figures who lived through the era describe how a scene assembled in basements and warehouses grew into a global phenomenon, and how a public backlash, including a notorious stadium event where thousands of disco records were destroyed, tried and failed to erase it. The back half follows disco's DNA into house, hip-hop, and pop, showing how the same basslines and four-on-the-floor rhythms resurfaced decade after decade under new names. It plays less like a chronological history lesson and more like an oral history told by the people who were actually on the dancefloor.
Cast & crew
The film draws its testimony straight from the source: Chic co-founder Nile Rodgers, singer and performer Billy Porter, vocalist Martha Wash, the late disco icon Sylvester by way of archival material, and DJ Jellybean Benítez all appear, giving firsthand accounts rather than secondhand analysis. Directors Omar Majeed and Peter Mishara let these voices carry most of the narration, leaning on lived experience over narrator-driven exposition.
Context & significance
Made in Canada and drawing on international archives, the documentary arrives at a moment when disco-era sounds keep resurfacing in contemporary pop and dance music, giving the film's central argument, that disco was pushed underground rather than killed, a present-tense relevance. It sits alongside a wave of recent music documentaries reexamining genres that were dismissed in their own time and reassessed decades later.
Where & how to watch
Disco's Revenge is available on K-Time with a free account login; the page itself can be browsed without signing in. K-Time's Farsi-first interface makes it straightforward for Persian-speaking viewers to search out music documentaries like this one alongside the rest of the catalog.