Join Flotsam Festival for an ode to the surf road trip through film, photo, and live music score. Filmmaker and musician Andrew Kidman and his band The Windy Hills will take audiences on a journey with a live soundtrack to road trip clips, including a screening of seminal film Litmus + other highway fare.

Windy Hills have performed live film scores the world over, including closing the Sydney Festival to a sold out crowd at the Sydney Opera House with Kidman’s film Spirit of Akasha.

Don’t miss this roadtrip edition, exclusive to Flotsam.

Location: Iron and Resin. Doors 5pm. Ticketed.

About Litmus:

Released 1996, 56 mins

“Litmus was the first surfing film by Andrew Kidman. Dubbed the surf film of the 90’s. This cult video features some great footage of surfing legends like Miki Dora, Wayne Lynch, Tom Curren, Derek Hynd, and Terry Fitzgerald. Set to an awesome soundtrack, this is one of the most creative and beautifully executed surfing films of its decade.” – Surf Network

Except from ‘The Litmus Effect’ by Steve Shearer:

Twenty years have passed since a disillusioned Andrew Kidman teamed up with Jon Frank and Mark Sutherland to make Litmus. Time passed in a blink. Kidman is a father of two now, riding a self-shaped channel-bottom single-fin. Still surfing and creating, walking the walk every day. The bastards never beat him down.

I met with Kidman on a winter day by a North-Coast river mouth, where we talked by a slowly receding tide. I asked him what makes Litmus continue to resonate through the years while the better-financed movies following in its wake were largely forgotten. “We had ideas,” he said. “We knew we wanted to say all these things. Surfers are more than one-dimensional beings. There were lots of big ideas proposed in the film, and maybe that’s why it resonated.”

For Fitzgerald, Litmus, like The Endless Summer and Morning of the Earth, “opened up a non-conditional view of surfing. There were no parameters on it. It speaks to the human spirit. They make statements about generations, but if you really look at it, they are statements about the whole. That’s where Litmus fits in. It’s a watershed movie.”

Twenty years from now, where will surfing be? A non-oceanic future beckons via wave pools. Overcrowded lineups will make it increasingly hard to find the space to continue developing our art form. If surf culture should start to stagnate once again, it would be comforting to think there will be three amigos looking for a way to put some soul back into surfing. They could do worse than look to Litmus as a blueprint.