David Byrne’s 2025–2026 Who Is the Sky? world tour is becoming a 70mm concert film directed by Brady Corbet, currently in post-production. Shot across Byrne’s Baltimore performances on both 8-perf and 15-perf 70mm, the project offers an intriguing collision between one of music’s most visually innovative performers and the filmmaker behind The Brutalist.

David Byrne has never really made a distinction between music and the visual world surrounding it. From Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense to his later solo performances, his concerts have always felt less like concerts than carefully choreographed pieces of living art.

The forthcoming concert film, Who Is the Sky?, was filmed during multiple performances of Byrne’s 2025–2026 world tour at Baltimore’s Hippodrome Theatre, his hometown. The project is directed by Brady Corbet, whose most recent film, The Brutalist, became one of the most visually ambitious films of the past year. The film is currently in post-production, although its final release date and distributor have not yet been announced.

That combination of Byrne, Corbet and 70mm is strange enough to be immediately intriguing.

The Who Is the Sky? tour itself was designed as a highly visual production. Byrne performs alongside an ensemble of 13 musicians, singers and dancers who move continuously across the stage, folding choreography, storytelling, music and visual art into one constantly shifting environment. The tour began in September 2025 and has traveled across four continents and more than 150 performances.

In other words, there is a lot to capture. And Corbet apparently wanted to capture all of it.

Rather than using conventional concert-film photography, Corbet shot the Baltimore performances on both 8-perf and 15-perf 70mm. Byrne initially admitted that he did not understand just how much the format would change the finished image. After seeing frames from the shoot, however, he said the format captured the “wide screen visual scope” of the performance in a way he had never seen before.

Byrne's history with concert films is already extraordinary. Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense transformed a Talking Heads performance into something closer to cinema than documentation, becoming one of the most celebrated concert films ever made. Decades later, Spike Lee filmed Byrne's Broadway production American Utopia, another attempt to translate the musician's unusually theatrical approach to performance into a visual medium. The latter went on to win two Emmys.

Who Is the Sky? therefore arrives with a difficult legacy to follow. The question isn't simply whether Corbet can make a good concert film. It's whether there is anything left to discover about Byrne's performances through another camera.

That may be where Corbet becomes an interesting choice.

His breakthrough as a filmmaker has been defined by an interest in scale, architecture and the psychological effects of enormous spaces. The Brutalist is obsessed with buildings as physical manifestations of ambition, trauma and power. His earlier film Vox Lux, meanwhile, examined the relationship between pop performance, celebrity and spectacle. Corbet also dedicated Vox Lux to Demme following the director's death, making his arrival in Byrne's cinematic orbit feel particularly unexpected.

It is tempting, then, to imagine that Corbet might approach Byrne's stage less like a documentarian and more like a filmmaker constructing a world.

That remains speculation; the filmmakers have not disclosed how the finished film will be structured but the possibilities are exciting. The enormous negative area of 70mm could emphasize the geometry of Byrne's choreography, allowing bodies to remain visible within the larger stage rather than constantly cutting between individual performers. The format could make the concert feel architectural: dancers crossing an enormous frame, musicians moving through space, Byrne himself becoming one element within a much larger composition.

A concert film this visually ambitious risks becoming so fascinated with its own spectacle that it competes with the performer. Byrne's best stage work has always been meticulously designed, but its power comes partly from the strange simplicity of watching human beings move together. There is a danger in making that intimacy too grand. Seventy-millimeter photography can make something feel monumental;

There is also the inevitable Stop Making Sense problem. Any new David Byrne concert film exists in the shadow of Demme's masterpiece. Trying to outdo it would be pointless. The more interesting possibility is that Corbet isn't trying to. Instead, he may be documenting an entirely different era of Byrne's career: an older artist revisiting his catalog while presenting new material through a production explicitly concerned with movement, community and connection.

That idea seems particularly relevant to the current tour. Corbet has described the performance as an “inclusive celebration of community,” specifically connecting the production to Baltimore, which he called one of America's underappreciated historic cities.

And perhaps that is ultimately what makes Who Is the Sky? worth watching for. Byrne has spent much of his career asking how music changes when it enters another medium—film, theater, dance, architecture, technology. Now a filmmaker known for enormous cinematic ambition gets to ask the question from the opposite direction: What happens when cinema enters David Byrne's world?

For now, we don't know exactly what Corbet has made. There is no release date, no announced distributor and no finished trailer to decode. What we do know is that somewhere in post-production is a 70mm portrait of one of music's most visually restless performers, filmed in his hometown by one of contemporary cinema's most ambitious young directors.

If the footage lives up to the format, Who Is the Sky? may not simply be another concert film.

It might be an experiment in figuring out how large David Byrne's world can become.