Q: ‘What film would you make if you had a million dollars?’ George Kuchar: ‘I couldn’t work under those conditions.’
The hungry beast that is the Hollywood film industry demands a constant turnover of huge budgets and big stars. Not so another American tradition. Trash films delight in low budgets and so-called ‘bad taste’. They are lurid, camp, transgressive, wild and DIY, made by friends and lovers who subvert received ideas about gender, sex and identity. Their history goes back to the carny sideshows of yore, breaking the fourth wall and revelling in audiences’ complicit inclusion in both the shocks and jokes. Shown at cheap drive-ins, alternative art spaces and midnight movie palaces, these queer, divine, eye-popping works challenge the limits of censorship whilst blurring the boundaries between art and exploitation, parody and homage, excess and play.
Q: ‘What film would you make if you had a million dollars?’
George Kuchar: ‘I couldn’t work under those conditions.’
The hungry beast that is the Hollywood film industry demands a constant turnover of huge budgets and big stars. Not so another American tradition. Trash films delight in low budgets and so-called ‘bad taste’. They are lurid, camp, transgressive, wild and DIY, made by friends and lovers who subvert received ideas about gender, sex and identity. Their history goes back to the carny sideshows of yore, breaking the fourth wall and revelling in audiences’ complicit inclusion in both the shocks and jokes. Shown at cheap drive-ins, alternative art spaces and midnight movie palaces, these queer, divine, eye-popping works challenge the limits of censorship whilst blurring the boundaries between art and exploitation, parody and homage, excess and play.
Explore the season, curated by William Fowler and Justin Johnson - playing through April 2026 at BFI Southbank