Filmmaker Merrill Aldighieri returns to Howl! with her latest work, A Certain Ratio – Live at Hurrah, a 45-minute document of the legendary Manchester post-punk ensemble captured in their element at New York City’s iconic Hurrah nightclub. A Certain Ratio were among the most viscerally alive acts to emerge from the Factory Records orbit; a band that fused funk basslines, percussion, and an almost feverish minimalism into something that defied easy categorization. Long revered by cult followers on both sides of the Atlantic, their American club appearances remain the stuff of downtown legend, and Aldighieri – with her singular eye for the charged space between performer and audience – was there to catch it. The result is not merely an archival record but a work of atmosphere: a film that puts you in the room, in the dark, in the heat of a scene that would ripple through underground music for decades to come.

The evening will also feature Wallflowers; a silent wall projection and looped animation created by Aldighieri as a companion piece. Designed to inhabit the edges of the space, the piece transforms the venue itself into an extension of the screen. It is a fitting gesture from a filmmaker whose work has always refused to stay contained within the frame. Aldighieri’s body of work – which includes her celebrated documents of New Order’s New York debut and the shape-shifting new wave spectacle of Shöx Lumania – has established her as one of the great visual archivists of a moment when music, fashion, and avant-garde film collapsed into one another on the floors of Lower Manhattan clubs. With A Certain Ratio – Live at Hurrah and Wallflowers, she once again invites us not just to watch history, but to feel its presence on all sides.