Top Spot DVD – Frances Williams , Helen Laker

Brit artist Tracey Emin’s debut feature charts the rites of passage of six teenage girls growing up in the faded seaside resort of Margate, where Emin herself grew up. The film charts the girls’ often traumatic experiences as they deal with love, sex and death.

Taking its title from a teenage disco, this eagerly anticipated first feature from British artist Tracey Emin marks a new chapter in her body of autobiographical work…Drawing on her experiences growing up in Margate, the film features six teenage girls – Frances, Helen, Katie, Kieri, Laura and Lizzie – who all have a tale to tell. One moment filled with bravado, the next awkward and insecure. In a series of interviews to camera, the Margate girls tell their individual stories. We learn about Helen and her love of the Sphinx, a ride at the Dreamland funfair, where she snogged a lad who she is convinced has joined the foreign legion. Katie was raped at the end of her Christmas holiday – he broke me in, she says of the abuser. Kieri has a lovebite as a result of a strange sex game involving an older woman. And Lizzie takes the stories to a harrowing and dramatic culmination, involving a miscarriage and suicide.The film is hard-edged and disturbing, but it’s also Emin’s poem to Margate, mixing DV footage Super 8 film into lyrical montage. The natural beauty of the sea and the sunsets is linked with Margate’s more manmade pleasures, underscored with a selection of 70s songs that formed the soundtrack to the artist’s own adolescence.