Screening times:
Friday, July 21, 6:30 PM - Half-capacity screening
Friday, July 21, 9:00 PM - Half-capacity screening
Saturday, July 22, 6:30 PM - Half-capacity screening
Kevin Hegge | Documentary | Canada | 2022 | 104m
For the first weekend of Pride we are delighted to be able to screen the feature documentary Tramps!
Tramps! is a feature-length documentary focusing on the iconic fashion and musical movement The New Romantics AKA “Blitz Kids” from London, England. Centring around key members of this movement, the film recounts the tale of how this group of outsiders helped reinvent London’s infamous underground art community, gaining them worldwide notoriety. From the original squatted communes like “The Exploding Galaxy” in the 1960’s, to the pre-punk art movement and confrontational performance work in squatted industrial spaces in the 1970s’, the short-lived punk movement from 1977 to 1979, up to the flamboyant “Blitz Kids” that established the more well known moniker of the “New Romantics” in the 1980’s, Tramps! looks at how this long-established sense of hedonism was unexpectedly stamped out by the AIDS crisis, while certain elements of it flooded out from the underground and completely took over the mainstream through rave culture in the 1990’s and points towards the exasperated London of today.
The film repositions The New Romantics as an art movement rather than solely a pop-cultural one. It looks at the seemingly carefree existence of this group in the pre-AIDS era, creating and expressing themselves through their radical protodrag, perplexing the public and the media who couldn’t look away like a cultural car crash. Their presence and very visible lifestyle on the streets of London was nurtured by having little sense of consequence and resulted in a flourishing of creativity that straddled film, music, art and fashion. The film is an allegorical gesture to artists of any generation trying to navigate how to produce work in an aggressively capitalist political economy. It happens to take place in London but speaks to artists everywhere. The film also features music by Verity Sussman (Electrelane) and Matthew Sims (WIRE, It Hugs Back). Eschewing the well-known New Romantic pop songs of that era, the soundtrack creates something completely new that drives the story into a contemporary and less formulaic world. The resulting, beautifully idiosyncratic music in the film stands alone as a work of art, loaded with its own unpredictability and impulses.
"Fiercely political, Tramps! is a radical defence of art in the purest sense and stands proudly as a lens through which to frame a desperately needed contemporary reassessment of current attitudes towards the relationship between art and commerce." -Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, AWFJ.org
"A portrait of a rare moment in modern history where art, identity and circumstances came together to create a beautiful pivot in British society." -Rachel Ho, Exclaim!
"it is simultaneously an account of street fashion’s evolution, an LGBTQ+ historical document and a deep dive into the degenerate corners of ’80s underground culture – bringing a key period of uninhibited London-based creativity to a whole new generation." -Wendy Ide, Screen Daily
Tickets $8.75 ($8 cash at the door if available).
Half capacity
Half capacity
Half capacity
