CAMP AT THE CINEMA arrives at the Blackpool Film Festival 

Blackpool Film Festival heads to the ARC Cinema (formerly Backlot) on Thursday 11 December for an evening of high drama and huge emotions at a special screening of Paul Verhoeven’s SHOWGIRLS (1995).

Using the much loved sensibility of camp, Harry Clayton-Wright and Catherine Mugonyi created CAMP AT THE CINEMA, a live cinema event that highlights iconic over the top moments on the silver screen. Audiences will be treated to a funny, engaging and insightful cinema talk that explores the idea of camp and shares examples of its presence in the world of film melodrama.

Using comedy, lip sync, short entertaining clips, well researched insights into cinema history and costume, the duo will entertain and educate audiences with their quest of curating the campest moments ever captured on film.

CAMP AT THE CINEMA is part of TOO MUCH - MELODRAMA ON FILM, a major UK-wide season of film presented by the British Film Institute, that celebrates the vivid visual language, heightened dramatics and emotional pathos at the heart of melodrama. United by their emotion driven plots, vivid visual language and self-conscious audience manipulation, these films are designed to make you break down in tears, cause a scene, fall in love, feel something. 

Melodrama is steeped in contradiction. Swooningly romantic, people fall in love at first sight, sacrifice their lives in acts of devotion, find one another across space and time. Simultaneously they are grounded in the trappings of reality: rigid class boundaries, threat of punishment, and fear of scandal loom at every corner. The characters in these films are culturally diverse, from different generations and social backgrounds, but endlessly human and relatable. Their stories often shed light on injustice and oppression. Imperfectly feminist yet endlessly empathetic, their sensationalist struggles carry searing social commentary beneath the glossy veneer of attention-grabbing colours, lurid plotlines and sentiment. 

The centrepiece of the Blackpool TOO MUCH event will be Paul Verhoeven’s campy cult classic SHOWGIRLS (1995) which returns to cinemas for its 30th anniversary in dazzling 4K. Elizabeth Berkley stars as a young drifter turned Las Vegas showgirl in Verhoeven's extravagant exploration of American excess - a box office flop which has since been reclaimed as an LGBTQIA+ community favourite. 

As regular collaborators, Harry and Catherine have been thinking about CAMP AT THE CINEMA for a long time and waiting for the right opportunity. Building on three part video series Camp in the Collection (2021), where producer Catherine Mugonyi along with writer and performer Harry Clayton-Wright explored the collections of Preston’s Harris museum through the lens of camp, and also after Harry’s cinema heritage event A Night at the Plaza (2023) staged at Opera North’s Howard Assembly Room for East Street Arts, Historic England and Leeds City Council; they’ve developed and used these delivery methods to create an exciting live cinema performance lecture that explores Melodrama in a similar engaging fashion.

As soon as the TOO MUCH - MELODRAMA ON FILM season was announced by Filmhub North, they thought “Well, this is perfect!” - A great way to kick off a series of engaging talks on a variety of cinematic themes while being fun, overdramatic, extravagant and quite frankly 'too much’.

“A much loved notion, aesthetic and way of being, camp is something very close to me in my life - I literally have the word tattooed on my thigh - and as a long time lover of the medium of film to communicate camp in all its glory, it’s been a total joy to put this project together with Catherine. We’re going to touch on some of people’s favourite moments and also hopefully introduce them to some lesser known iconic moments committed to the silver screen. One thing’s for sure, get ready for some Camp at the Cinema!”  

CAMP AT THE CINEMA continues its North West tour at the ARC Cinema in Blackpool on 11 December, followed by the Harris in Preston on 15 January.