BELL MANOR PARK
Thursday, August 15, 2024

Kinky Boots

With the short film Ancestral Threads

TOPS’ 2024 kick-off screening at our Bell Manor Park venue, this screening is geared to older kids and adult audiences (younger children should nonetheless come out for pre-show arts & crafts every evening, and shouldn’t miss our screenings of Mary Poppins and Monsters, Inc. that same weekend!). A crowd-pleasing film that was adapted to the Tony-award winning smash-hit musical of the same name, Kinky Boots is a heart-warming drama about family and a community of workers at a working-class UK shoe factory. After the death of his father, Charlie Price (Joel Edgerton) is forced to return home to Northampton to try to save the struggling family business. After a chance encounter with Lola (played by a magnetic Chiwetel Ejiofor), a drag queen whose high heels routinely snap under her statuesque weight, Charlie hatches a plan to save his family business: the factory will make high heels for drag queens. Though the factory’s largely masculine workers are initially uncomfortable with Lola’s presence, and resent Charlie’s efforts to rush a line of heels out for a fashion show in Milan, eventually the group comes together to save the factory – and put on a killer performance to boot.

Paired with Kinky Boots is Cree filmmaker Sean Stiller’s short documentary about an Indigenous fashion show, Ancestral Threads. The film follows former model Joleen Mitton, who uses fashion as medicine for her community, at Vancouver Indigenous Fashion Week. Full of sumptuous traditional-meets-trendy outfits, the film is an engaging portrait of the behind-the-scenes world of Indigenous fashion.