The Hobo Film Festival at the Tricycle
A Touring Film Festival Highlighting the History of Hobos, Train-Hopping and American Tramp Culture.
For the very first time, ‘Agency Films’ (In Seattle USA) will bring it’s highly successful ‘Hobo Film Festival’ to the UK. Having gathered some of the very best submissions of shorts, from dozens of filmmakers, who produce films about train-hopping and Hobo culture, they will deliver a visual feast of this colorful and truly important facet of American history.
Along-side a rich array of Hobo ‘Shorts’, the Festival will also bring you a special screening of the acclaimed Feature Documentary ‘Hobo’ and a personal appearance and Q&A from it’s Award Winning Director John T. Davis.
“Hobo’: the classic American rail-tramp, a wandering man who works infrequently – but not a bum”
Dir. John T. Davis
1991/Ire/ 90m (documentary)
In 1991 John T Davis, set off on a dangerous, illegal 2,000 mile journey across America, to make ‘Hobo’, his remarkable award-winning film. Hiding his camera in his bed-role, Davis jumped trains and led the life of a ‘Hobo’. The film he made is an intensely personal portrait of an ex-Vietnam vet turned Hobo, who calls himself Beargrease, as he hops the railways from North Dakota through the Rockies to the Pacific rim, on a bitter, cold, hard track known as the Highline. With a stunning musical sound track, including songs by Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, the film documents the daily life of this fiercely independent man, whose personal philosophy is a mix of common sense and profound anger at the condition of modern America. His thoughts and stories, and those of the other ‘boxcar philosophers’ he meets along the way, throw up major questions about human nature, freedom and responsibility, and the thin thread on which our own reality hangs.
John T. Davis is Ireland’s most innovative and creative film-maker. His films cover many subjects, but are drawn together by some common threads: travel, the parallels and links between Ireland and America, concern for the underdog and, always, music. Heavily influenced by the work of Bob Dylan and Jack Kerouac and the American film-maker D.A. Pennebaker, Davis is one of the few film-makers to have been invited to shoot Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, John Lee Hooker and Arlo Guthrie. Now a Musician and Songwriter in his own right, his earliest music memories include the ‘singing cowboys’ Roy Rogers and Gene Autry and his greatest influence’s have been Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. Davis has made more than 40 films to date including the cult films ‘Route 66’ (1985) and ‘Shellshock Rock’ (1979).