Screening times:
Saturday, April 5, 8:30 PM

John Waters | 1972 | USA | 92m
with Divine, David Lochary, Mink Stole, Mary Vivian Pearce, Danny Mills, Edith Massey

It's John Waters' birthday this month! Born April 22, 1946, the iconic American director's five-decade filmmaking career initially cemented his status as Pope of Trash until garnering more formal recognition at institutions like The Lincoln Centre, The National Film Preservation Board and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. A selection of Waters' films will screen on Saturday nights in April at Carbon Arc!

John Waters made bad taste perversely transcendent with the forever shocking counterculture sensation Pink Flamingos, his most infamous and daring cinematic transgression.

Outré diva Divine is iconic as the wanted criminal hiding out with her family of degenerates in a trailer outside Baltimore while reveling in her tabloid notoriety as the “Filthiest Person Alive.”

When a pair of sociopaths (Mink Stole and David Lochary) with a habit of kidnapping women in order to impregnate them attempt to challenge her title, Divine resolves to show them and the world the true meaning of the word “filth.”

Incest, cannibalism, shrimping, and film history’s most legendary gross-out ending—Waters and his merry band of Dreamlanders leave no taboo unsmashed in this gleefully subversive ode to outsiderhood, in which camp spectacle and pitch-black satire are wielded in an all-out assault on respectability.

"John Waters‘ “Pink Flamingos” has been restored for its 25th anniversary revival, and with any luck at all that means I won’t have to see it again for another 25 years... I am not giving a star rating to “Pink Flamingos,” because stars simply seem not to apply. It should be considered not as a film but as a fact, or perhaps as an object." - Roger Ebert (1997)

"'Pink Flamingos' is farcical, preposterous, in impossibly bad taste, satirical, satyrical, wicked, grotesque, unbelievable, hilarious and witty - all the good words. It is a hallmark John Waters film, an absolute classic piece of American cinema, right up there with "The Birth of a Nation", "Dr. Strangelove", and "Boom!" - Gus Van Sant, The Advocate (1997)

Winner: National Film Registry - National Film Preservation Board (Library of Congress) 2021

Tickets $8.75 ($8 cash at the door if available)