Midnight Sun Festival - The Lost Tapes

Steep rock walls meet the ocean gap at the far end of a windswept island in Lofoten. In the old days, people lived here by catching eagles with their hands. We turn the clock until the summer of 2014 and meet a bunch of electronic music enthusiasts who plan to make Norway’s first public psytrance festival at an abandoned airport at the end of the Moskenesstraumen. Crews from all over Scandinavia have been in place for almost a month and a stone of several tons has been set up as a DJ desk. Here, the zealots behind the festival hope that music will be played 24 hours a day from the scenes “Sun Temple”, “Sun Observatory” and “Heimertussen Beach Stage”. Tickets have been sold to people from more than 50 countries, and a film crew arrives on the island. If everything goes according to plan, the “Star Sounds Orchestra” will open the festival at midnight…

Five years later, no film has been edited and the organizers believe the material has been lost. Then a hard drive appears in Oslo. With “Midnight Sun Festival – The Lost Tapes”, Lasse Dørumsgaard Stensrud makes his debut as a documentary filmmaker. After being handed over the entire film archive – which also includes material from the same festival in 2016 – he has spent the last year finding out what happened when thousands of people met to dance under the midnight sun on Værøy.