SLAMDANCE 2025 – Relive the scrappy, exhilarating days of 90’s radio with the new documentary 40 Watts From Nowhere. Filmmaker Sue Carpenter takes us back to Silverlake, California in 1995 where, in a fit of frustration with the state of the public airwaves, she launches a pirate radio station from her modest 1 bedroom apartment. Dodging the goons at the Federal Communications Commission, Carpenter exploits a legal loophole to eventually build what would give a rebellious voice to music fans in southern California. Of course this would all come at a price, as so many things do. Yet Carpenter makes all of it look so cool and worth the effort, doomed as it was.

After leaving San Francisco, Carpenter lands in a bohemian berg just outside of downtown Los Angeles, determined to start a radio station. To do so, however, would cost money that the average person just doesn’t have. In theory, the airwaves belong to the public. Yet the FCC were and still are the gate keepers to a public entity. Charging absurd licensing fees that only the largest corporations could afford. As a result, the airwaves were a homogenous sea of processed noise. Carpenter and a ragtag band of DJs sought to take back, in some small way, what belonged to everyone.

Using snappy animated chapter breaks and impressively exhaustive footage, we follow the journey that Carpenter led when she built a 40-watt FM station in her apartment that became a beacon for independent broadcasting. Initially the station was only active for 2 hours a day. Yet it swiftly grew into a 24 hour operation. Former DJs recall the sneaky, exciting world they lived in, sharing what it was like to live in fear of the FCC. As if living under an oppressive regime, the DJs would quietly enter Carpenter’s modest home, then circle around under the stairs to a closet where they broadcast, thumbing their nose at authority. As a legal case played out in San Francisco against a similar station, KBLT found an audience, and Carpenter became bolder. Strangers were coming in and out of her home to spin CD’s of music, The Red Hot Chili Peppers were playing in her apartment, and Mazzy Star was headlining a benefit for the station’s legal defense fund. It’s no spoiler to say that the station grew. It’s also no spoiler to say they were eventually caught.

The magic that 40 Watts From Nowhere achieves is that we are transported to a time and place so fully. You can practically smell the cigarette smoke and soured beer wafting from the screen as Carpenter cleans up her tiny apartment after a night of broadcasting. You can feel the optimism and turbulent energy of the 90’s knowing that while the movement was doomed, it was never pointless. I think that artist Camille Rose Garcia sums it up best when she says “If you are creative despite capitalism, despite feeling like the world is ending, it’s a revolutionary act.” 40 Watts From Nowhere is a invigorating bolt of restless idealism that will remind you both of the folly and virtue of resistance however productive and whatever the result.