Who says that a movie needs to be a fixed thing, locked in place for eternity? Veteran filmmaker Gary Hustwit has upended that view with his acclaimed new documentary about pioneering musician Brian Eno, which uses a bespoke generative program to produce a radically different film for each and every screening. The film, which was a hit at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival and then toured major cities last summer and fall (with a new version showing each day), is now heading to homes worldwide in a 24-hour livestream event starting at noon EST on Friday, January 24.

It will be the first chance for many people to see Eno, which was shortlisted for Best Documentary Feature at this year’s Academy Awards, and to see multiple iterations of a film that culls 500-plus hours of footage from the artist-musician’s video archive. The film also incorporates 50 hours of material that Hustwit shot of Eno and past collaborators talking about his time as a founding member of the ‘70s rock band Roxy Music and later work producing genre-bending hits for David Bowie, U2, the Talking Heads, and more.

The film isn’t just a random mashup of video. Each version opens with an interview of Eno in the studio and closes with another of the musician in his rose garden, scenes that operate as bookends for an exploration of the artist’s proudly experimental approach to his work. Other scenes also pop up in each version, Hustwit says, “so it gives a little bit of a skeleton in terms of narrative flow.”

But roughly 70% of Eno changes with each screening, based on a complicated program that Hustwit developed with Brendan Dawes – a U.K.-based digital artist who did all the coding on an original platform that the duo have dubbed Brain One (an anagram of the film’s subject). “There’s all kinds of programming happening in how the system chooses scenes, where it places them in the film’s arc, what then it will pull to connect with those scenes,” Hustwit says. As a result, the running time varies from about 80 minutes to 87 minutes, and no two versions will ever be alike.

Read my full story, including the technology behind Brain One and how it’s being adapted for future film projects (including fiction films), at Fast Company.