Hog Heaven: The Pigz Brotherz Story: Documenting a Rosy High and a Forced Decline

Scott Simmerly Jr.’s Hog Heaven: The Pigz Brotherz Story is an 11-minute documentary about the titular Pigz Brotherz, a local band from the Raleigh of the 1980s. In the Raleigh of 2026, the scene has changed considerably and local art is fighting against becoming its refuse. And though death comes for us all, this tribute to one of the band’s founding members questions the merit of forced oblivion and obsolescence.

The residents and history of downtown Raleigh are being erased and reconstituted to build (more) moneymaking ventures. Condos and skyscrapers are pushing out local, historical businesses. Places like Berkeley Cafe. A mainstay of the local music scene and the launchpad of The Pigz Brotherz. Sonny Sherrill, Chip Davis, and Danny Squires—three young men who started a band without a plan and kept playing for the next 39 years. Squires serves as the memory keeper. He makes for a charming subject, with overlapping memories, brimming humour, and a textured humility that says more about a long life than the recollections themselves.

Sequences of the band’s performances come in a mix of grainy videotape footage and the vertical aspect ratios of smartphones, a four-decade history condensed in just format. Snatches of music and dialogue add a specific kind of vitality that has to do with this being a music documentary which concerns itself with the ephemerality of youth and joy. In the face of this latest stage of capitalism, gentrification and enshittification go hand in rotting hand, and they seem to take away in new and more effective ways everyday pleasures, the very possibility of living. Squires puts it drily: I guess that’s progress. Well, is it really?

Swarmed by news of old men’s ruinous actions whose consequences they will never have to face tends to make you forget that any alternatives exist. It’s a warm reminder with Hog Heaven that legacies can be something that creates and maintains communities, that concerns itself with little joys instead of bottomless profit. Squires carries the film with his infectious energy, an exuberance that resists being slotted into irrelevance. Yes, it has been forty years. It has been only forty years. The pleasures of Berkeley have not been around long enough to be tossed out for being used up quite yet.

Watch Hog Heaven: The Pigz Brotherz Story Documentary Trailer