Broken Social Scene: It's All Gonna Break

You may know this band as Broken Social Scene, but to me they are my friends. I followed them around for years with my camera without knowing one day they’d be celebrated around the world as one of Canada’s biggest indie rock bands. I tried to make a film about them before. They said no! 20 years later, I am trying again.

Stephen Chung

Cited by Pitchfork as “one of the most important artists of the last 25 years”, Broken Social Scene is an unusual band, in that it began as a duo and mutated into a loose collective with as many as 19 regular or semi-regular contributors over the years. Also unusual: cameraman Stephen Chung was right there with them right from the start, picking up live shows, studio sessions, parties, hangouts, just because…

It’s All Gonna Break (the title can be read two ways) is a candid record of BSS’s genesis and evolution from the turn of the millennium, through their rapid rise, and right up to the pandemic — though it’s really the early material which captures the imagination. The band put the brakes on Chung releasing this material two decades ago, but it emerges now with greater emotional weight and a keener sense of what a remarkable Scene this was.