Kids Like Us, a short film by Luke Jaden and Richie Hawtin released by NOWNESS on 17 June 2025, returns to Detroit techno culture in the early 1990s. Shot on 35 mm, it builds its story around energy, bass and community.
Memory without a history lesson
The film need not be a complete chronology to have documentary value. Through its characters, film texture and period-inspired situations, it evokes a social atmosphere of places, encounters and discovery that an equipment list could never capture alone.
Hawtin's involvement connects the project to the experience of an artist who crossed the Windsor–Detroit border and was beginning to develop Plastikman. His is a particular perspective, not the whole story: an entry point into a history shaped by many people and communities.
Technology as a way to remember
There is a productive contrast between subject and medium: a culture associated with electronic machines is revisited on photochemical film. Rather than fetishizing 35 mm, the short uses grain, light and editing to explore materiality and time.
For Tech, that is the most compelling point. Technology is not only a tool for making music; it is a narrative choice that can change how a scene is remembered.