
Our Hobby is Depeche Mode
Jeremy Deller and Nicholas Abrahams travel the world to find people whose devotion to Depeche Mode borders on the reasonable definition of obsession. In St. Petersburg, fans hold conventions where members trade bootleg tapes and dress in matching band merchandise. In Tehran, young Iranians risk trouble to attend underground DM listening parties, since Western music faces restrictions there. German fans maintain shrines in their homes, and a Romanian collector shows off a stockpile of memorabilia that fills entire rooms. The filmmakers let their subjects talk without irony or condescension, treating each fan's testimony as a window into what a band can mean when official culture offers little else. Archival concert clips and interview footage with the band itself are woven between the fan segments, but the real subject is the fans, not the group they follow. The film never asks whether this devotion is strange; it simply follows where it leads, from Moscow apartments to Iranian basements, and lets the scale of the obsession speak for itself.