Rock the Box
2015 · 9m · Canada
Directed by Katherine Monk
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Filmmaker Katherine Monk follows Vancouver DJ Rhiannon Rozier as she attempts to break through electronic dance music's gender barrier, including a decision to pose for Playboy that she once would have rejected.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Monk's framing of Rozier's Playboy choice as liberation-through-contradiction is genuinely uncomfortable in ways most docs won't risk—but the film itself plays it too safe, treating provocation as theme rather than formal choice, which undercuts the whole subversive premise.
A competent entry in the musician-portraiture tradition, though it sits uneasily between intimate character study and broader commentary on industry sexism; the film's tonal uncertainty—contemplative one moment, provocative the next—suggests Monk hasn't fully resolved her own curatorial stance.
What makes this work is Monk's decision to let Rozier's ambivalence breathe without resolution: the Playboy shoot isn't framed as triumph or compromise but as a genuine paradox, and that refusal to narrativize the contradiction is the whole film.