Rock the Box

Electronic Dance Music (EDM) is the most lucrative sector of the music industry, but it’s a world dominated by men, who represent 100 per cent of the genre’s top earners. Rhiannon Rozier wanted to break into that world, but the Vancouver-raised DJ says she ran into the glass ceiling. She couldn’t make it to the next level, so she did something she never thought she would do: she posed for Playboy. The rationale seems absurd, yet strangely familiar, which is what attracted filmmaker/journalist Katherine Monk to Rozier’s story. “This is a movie about how our society assigns value to women,” says Monk, who followed Rozier to a show in Fort McMurray, Alberta to capture the surreal lifestyle and daily reality of a working DJ. Through impressionistic images, verite montage and a bathroom sequence showing Rozier negotiating with her own reflection as she dons her performance persona, Rock the Box shows us one woman who rocked expectation by owning her own image, her own voice, and her own box.