TRAMPS!
Rising from the nihilistic ashes of the punk movement in the late 1970s, a fresh crowd of flamboyant fashionistas, who would later be christened the New Romantics, began to materialize on the streets of East London, England.
TRAMPS! is a feature-length documentary that looks at how, in London in the 1980's, an onslaught of art students arriving in the city resulted in a unique cross-fertilization of British art, fashion, music and film which created a flourish of creative output, culminating in a group known as "The New Romantics". Repositioning the New Romantics as an art movement rather than an exclusively pop-cultural one, TRAMPS! provides a genealogy of like-minded artists that predated the 1980s, such as the influential Derek Jarman, and illustrates how they laid the foundations for the creative subcultures that followed. The decades of creative resilience described by the generation-spanning subjects of TRAMPS! act as a direct message of hope to artists at a time when it's needed most.
“A film about survival under a right-wing government, and the unshakeable impulse to make art in the first place, this might be a story about a past era, but the struggles this band of misfits faced back then feel just as relevant 40 years later.”
“Witty, wildly entertaining and, at times, coruscatingly bitchy, this should find a receptive audience at further festivals following its premiere in the closing night slot at BFI Flare.”
