Archival Replica of Leaf City FilmSalon protest T-Shirt.

100% Cotton. Tyvek addition.

Archival Replica of Leaf City FilmSalon protest T-Shirt. No account of Toronto civic culture at the turn of the 21st century would be complete without reckoning with The FilmSalon, the underground theater run by Rick Hull, the eccentric devotee of Canadian film. Hull’s programs—half lecture, half screening—brought him into near constant conflict with the Orange powers of the Toronto municipal bureaucracy culminating in 2007 when the city almost succeeded in shutting down his showing of Leaf City (1973).

Canada’s anemic domestic film industry struggled to cultivate and maintain talent in the postwar years, never succeeding in seriously competing with the entertainment powerhouse to the south. However, for a brief period in the 1970s Canada became home to the production of widely popular adult animation films, feeding a voracious North American audience. The strangest and most consequential of these films was Leaf City, an unapologetically nationalist film featuring the adult antics of an anthropomorphized symbol of Canada: the triple maple leaf. An odd success in America, the film was suppressed in Canada, ostensibly for its obscene content, but speculatively for its subversive patriotism.

These retrograde obscenity restrictions were still in place in 2007 when Hull attempted his screening, advertising the film via his trademark posters that blanketed every surface in Toronto. When his home cinema was shuttered by the RCMP on behalf of city hall, Hull began a one-man protest in front of Parliament, stapling his posters to his T-Shirt and refusing to budge. His lonely vigil quickly caught the attention of Canadians nationwide, and in the coming days a crowd quickly grew. Hull’s tenacity resulted in the overturning of the antiquated regime of censorship in Ontario [colloquially known in those days as the Presbyterian Saudi Arabia] and brought renewed interest to Leaf City, which would play across the nation in special FilmSalon solidarity screenings.

LMX Unlimited has reproduced the protest garb of Rick Hull, making this iconic moment in the history of Canadian nationalism widely available to a general public. 

Note: Hull’s posters are reproduced in waterproof Tyvek and stapled using special anti-corrosive stainless steel staples. That said, this garment should be carefully hand laundered and not be machine washed or dried.