SprayMasters directed by Manny Kirchheimer

SprayMasters is an breathtaking film!! In addition to revealing interviews with some of the movement's most well-known artists director Manny Kirchheimer delivers wonderful cinematography featuring rare and exclusive footage of many historic subway paintings. Highlights include double subway car murals DIRTY SLUG's "SL" "UG" LEE Quinones' Heaven Is Life-Earth is Hell, and work by masters like PADRE, SLAVE and others. This is a classic!

From Cinema Guild
In SprayMasters four ex-graffiti artists reflect on their early years as renegades who snuck into rail yards and decorated New York City subway cars with stolen paint while eluding arrest. Now in their forties and embraced by the establishment, Lee Quinones, Lady Pink, and Futura 2000 are prominent artists with an international following, while Zephyr is a widely published journalist who writes about graffiti and popular culture.

They talk about the extreme risks they took as teenagers, the joys of seeing their work on subway cars, the diverse styles of graffiti, its global reach, and its place in modern life, where it has been co-opted by advertising and fashion. Directed by Manny Kirchheimer (Tall), SprayMasters s a follow-up to his underground classic Stations of the Elevated (1980), one of the first films to feature New York’s infamous subway graffiti.

Although the exuberant painted trains are gone, they live again in Spraymasters in rare, never-before-seen footage, set to an electrifying original musical soundtrack that evokes the heyday of graffiti.

Directed by Manny Kirchheiner
2008, 85 minutes

Full information may be found at www.cinemaguild.com

* World Premiere, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2008
* Official Selection, Rotterdam International Hip-Hop Film Festival, 2008
* Official Selection, Gothenberg International Film Festival, 2009
* Official Selection, Max Ophulus Preis Film Festival, Germany, 2009

"A must-see" – The New York Sun