Picture for event

Wildwood NJ

With supporting short: O Dreamland

Dir: Carol Weaks Cassidy / Ruth Leitman. 1994, USA, 60 mins, Cert: 18 adv

-
Thu 7 July 2016 // 20:00

Tickets: £5 / £4

Join us on a summer night for the joys of the seaside holiday in its heyday, as we visit the east coasts of the US and the UK in very different times.

Wildwood, NJ received it's first UK screening at the Overnight Film Festival in February 2016. We are excited to announce that this previously overlooked film will now be screening at the Cube as part of a UK Wildwood NJ Tour.

Wildwood, New Jersey has long been the home of an annual summer migration for hundreds of thousands of holidaymakers heading to the beach. In 1992, Leitman and Cassidy, and an all-women crew, spent a summer with the girls of Wildwood.

Grandmothers and go-go girls; girls who work as vampires in boardwalk haunted houses. Tween girls stretching out on their first trip without their parents: young, rangy a little drunk on Bud, dukes up, nose open, with a couppla’ bucks to burn. A Wildwood honeymoon, virginity lost to a boardwalk stranger, fistfights, madness, babies—and no matter what—returning to Wildwood year after year as they grow up and grow old.

Shot through the gorgeous sun-kissed pastel tones of a Super 8 camera, Leitman and Cassidy’s film was synched frame by frame in the early days of non-linear editing. This portrait of youthful abandon and the magic of a summer was recently brought out of obscurity, 20 years after its initial release, after clips posted online went viral, creating a brand new fanbase, including singer Lana del Rey who appropriated its images for her videos.

Our supporting film, Lindsay Anderson’s O Dreamland brings us a very different, and very British, kind of bleak holiday magic, lost in time. Made in sunny Margate’s Dreamland funfair, with a 16mm camera and a crew of two in 1953, Anderson’s twelve minute short launched the Free Cinema movement with its uncompromising style and tone.