Some of the questions surrounding the celebrated, mystifying French electro duo Daft Punk are about to be answered. Daft Punk Unchained, the Grammy-winning group’s first documentary produced by BBC Worldwide France, will finally get an English language U.S. release via Showtime on December 10 at 9 p.m. EST.
The doc features extracts from interviews with Daft Punk as well as interviews with star collaborators and friends including Pharrell Williams, Kanye West, Giorgio Moroder, and Nile Rodgers according to BBC. And perhaps most intriguing, it appears we’ll see the group, at least partially, unmasked on film.
In a trailer for Daft Punk Unchained, we see a darkly-lit shot of the two men behind the mysterious group, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, being photographed without masks while a voice from (presumably) one of the artists explains some of the reasoning behind their mystique: “It’s really a misconception to feel like artists will be able to gain back some amount of control if this control is being somehow compromised along the way.”
The trailer goes on to show snippets of the band performing live, as well as shots of the duo in a television interview with black bags covering their faces, and parts of interviews with West, Rodgers, and songwriter Paul Williams.
The film explores the “robots” from their earliest days in mid-’90s Paris to their 2014 Grammy Award win in LA. Hervé Martin Delpierre directed the film, which was co-authored by Delpierre and Marina Rozenman. Daft Punk Unchained also features original theme music composed and arranged by Joseph Trapanese, who worked with Daft Punk on the score for the 2010 Disney sci-fi film Tron: Legacy. The 83 minute doc was originally aired on Canal Plus, a French television channel, in June.
Over Daft Punk’s 20-plus year career, the duo has released four studio albums, most recently 2013’s Grammy-winning multi-platinum record Random Access Memories which included the mega-hit Get Lucky (featuring Pharrell Williams).
There’s no word of a U.S. physical release for Daft Punk Unchained following its Showtime debut as of yet. The doc was released on DVD and Blu-ray last week in France.
