James Y. Lee
We here on the film side of the world are often prone to forgetting that Jonathan Glazer, the mind behind modern classics like Under the Skin and The Zone of Interest, is also the man who made Jamiroquai’s “Virtual Insanity” music video. That specific fact—which should bridge our perception of Glazer’s menacing feature films and his oft-memed music videos of great imagination—is mostly there to say that the avant-garde master has always had a close relationship with musicians. His résumé here ranges far and wide, spanning Radiohead, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Massive Attack, and Blur; perhaps his feature films make his music videos that much more surprising to watch, or the other way around. Whatever the case, Glazer’s new documentary, Joy of Joys, which world-premieres at this year’s New York Film Festival, is a return to form in that specific regard. It’s also a particular standout here; in one fell swoop, he’s added the likes of Olivia Rodrigo, Pulp, Arctic Monkeys, Cameron Winter of Geese, Damon Albarn of Gorillaz, and others to the musicians he’s trained his cameras on.
The reason for such a wide swath of recent music superstars, as we find out, is because of their involvement in the 2026 collaborative album HELP(2), created by the charity organization War Child as a sequel to 1995’s The Help Album. A UK-based benefit organization, War Child has been in frequent collaboration with local communities whose children have been caught in the crossfire of war zones. Recorded in three days to address the Bosnian War and the Srebrenica genocide, the original Help Album was a major instigator for War Child’s initial expansion, raising over a million pounds total that allowed them to create music centers in Bosnia and internationally grow their reach. The necessity, in the view of an organization like War Child, for a second Help album, speaks to the urgency of a terrifying cold war that’s put a lockdown on global peace; internationally charged wars waged in Ukraine and Iran, civil wars in Sudan and Yemen, Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, and a list whose addition of an “etc.” is too grim to even comment on.
Joy of Joys is, effectively, a 40-minute companion film co-devised by Jonathan Glazer and frequent collaborator and composer Mica Levi about the production of HELP(2), but its first merit is how unwilling it is to actually make itself about the stars behind the album. Yes, we get glimpses of virtually every single one of the aforementioned artists at work in the gigantic Abbey Road Studios. The first one we see is Olivia Rodrigo recording the album’s final track, a cover of the Magnetic Fields’ “The Book of Love”—but as a couple of London schoolchildren sneakily enter the studios, silently holding camcorders and wearing earplugs to film the musicians, we realize the true formal conceit of Joy of Joys is about these kids. Even while Glazer has installed cameras throughout the studios that film the musicians in mostly static, hovering, and wide compositions that accentuate the cavernous studios of Abbey Road, these children are the point of interest here. Their handheld and slipshod ways of filming what interests them provide a playful means of observing what could have been a very self-serious, branded documentary endeavor.
Glazer is building up to something here. But even in these behind-the-scenes moments, it becomes clear that this is yet another example of Jonathan Glazer working in formal defiance of traditional modes and conventions. Where we likely would have seen talking-head interviews of the most famous musicians present here, or glamorously emotional footage of them making their way through their tracks, we merely get very pragmatic and simple coverage of them from the young filmmakers Glazer’s enlisted, and editor Sam Jones. The most we get in terms of conversational material with these artists is them getting along with the children as they keep filming—Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker gently greets and guides the kids on a tour through the studios, and Winter hilariously confides in them about how he thinks he’s been stuffed in the “broom closet” of Abbey Road as a money-saving measure—but never formal interviews, or anything in which these musicians could make statements that are far too obvious for the film’s own good.
As such, Joy of Joys is never inclined to show us how these artists want to sell HELP(2) as an album, and merely shows their creative processes instead. We see them for much of the film’s duration as the kids would, recording fragments of their songs, simply at work, showing us excerpts and pieces of their tracks, which Glazer trusts will do enough to express their faith in what HELP(2) is meant to serve. It also is an expression of Glazer’s faith in the kids, who start rather casual about filming the musicians, rarely ever interrupting their processes, silently whispering to themselves about what they’re seeing—and soon reach a point where they’re trying to “perfect” the view of their shots, or in moments where the musicians are absent, covertly trying to learn their instruments. They are the filmmakers at work—as if we were watching the absurdly young origins of several D.A. Pennebakers, for instance. Jonathan Glazer’s more anthropological, omniscient perspectives of them and the musicians are merely scaffolding.
But they’re not the only children that Glazer’s given cameras to. Across Gaza City, Yemen, Sudan, and Ukraine, we also witness as children film their own moments of joy and energy in handheld cameras—sprinting across empty fields, through the remains and rubble of the cities that surround them, and inside their apartments and closets that may always be under threat of attack. The footage they capture here isn’t incorporated until much later on in the film’s events, but when they do, the effect is curtain-droppingly sobering. It is a display of happiness discovered in the midst of ruin, happiness that persists despite the horror of war, that might be at risk of falling to said horror, that is not unlike the curiosity and happiness we’ve already seen of the kids in Abbey Road Studios. Glazer and Jones gently cut back and forth between Abbey Road and these four specific war-struck lands, until the music from the former takes over scenes from the latter in a montage of great force that is as uplifting as it is utterly devastating to witness. If only the children in these regions could experience, in peacetime and in their homelands, the verve and uncontainable elation they somehow remain capable of amidst the wars that hang over their heads.
The cynical read is that this is the most formally effective way to sell HELP(2)’s utility as an album—an arthouse version of oft-parodied charity advertisements for international flashpoints of “third-world” starvation. The more earnest look is to see this as Jonathan Glazer’s rebuke of the invisibility and despair that made up The Zone of Interest, and the silence that the industry demanded of him following his speech at the Academy Awards for the film’s Best International Feature win. Glazer’s last feature provided the abject terror of seeing the Nazis head-on and forcing us to recognize ourselves in them, all while their slaughter and genocide unceasingly remain in earshot or in the back of our minds. In Joy of Joys, Glazer employs the reverse effect essentially. We witness the joy of these children most prominently, but still remain persistently aware of the war that looms behind them like a shadow; the effect is not a refusal of complicity, like it is with Zone‘s act of plainly witnessing the Höss dynasty, but rather an acknowledgment of tragedy that gives purpose to Joy of Joys‘ contradicting look at the playful children at its center.
It’s also a mission statement on Jonathan Glazer’s part. His carefully, tamely phrased acknowledgement of the genocide in Gaza at the 2024 Academy Awards was enough for his name to be denounced by thousands in the industry—but if Joy of Joys has proven anything, it’s the fact that Glazer’s ideals are as consistent and driving for him as ever, as the rubble of Gaza City is just as prioritized as Ukraine is, as Sudan, as Yemen. War everywhere that affects any child is a danger to us as a human species; the casual, unquestioning inclusion of children in groups that nations like Israel, Russia, and the United States have deemed dangers worth stomping out is among the most disturbing ways that war rots our consciences and our souls.
There’s a reason why, at one specific point, we see a large children’s chorus in Abbey Road Studios recording “Flags” with Albarn, followed moments later by an equally large crowd of kids sitting in a school tent in Yemen—this is a matter of scale. Think of what we lose when we put our children under the threat of war. Think of what it means to make art in service of drawing eyes to how dangerous this all is, how widespread it’s become across the globe. Glazer’s power as a filmmaker is in inviting us to do so without anything explicitly said at all.
