Thursday December 11th, 2025 | 7–9:30PM
Factory Media Centre | 366 Victoria Ave. N, Hamilton ON
Factory Media Centre and Orchid Contemporary are thrilled to present a free double feature screening of Australian artist duo Soda Jerk’s Terror Nullius (2018) and Hello Dankness (2023)!
Join us in person at Factory Media Centre on December 11th for a cozy winter screening! Due to limited capacity, please RSVP for the screening below.
Synopses
Part political satire, eco-horror and road movie, Terror Nullius is a political revenge fable constructed entirely from samples pirated from the Australian cinema cannon. Binding together a documentary impulse with speculative muckraking, Soda Jerk’s revisionist history of Australian politics opens a queer narrative space where cinema fictions and historical facts permeate each other in new ways. The apocalyptic desert camps of Mad Max 2 become the site of refugee detention, flesh-eating sheep are recast as anti-colonial insurgents and the women of Australian cinema go vigilante on Mel Gibson. Working within and against the official archive, Soda Jerk’s narrative collage film offers an incendiary un-writing of Australian national mythologies.
Funded by the Ian Potter Moving Image Commission in 2016, Terror Nullius was disowned by the organisation just days prior to the film’s premiere in 2018. The Ian Potter’s Board of Trustees described the work as “a very controversial piece of art” and “unAustralian”. The Guardian named the “dizzyingly ambitious satirical work” one of the best Australian films of the decade.
Hello Dankness is a political fable that bears witness to the psychotropic spectacle of American politics from 2016 to 2021, and the mythologies and lore that took root around it. Taking form as a suburban stoner musical, the film follows a neighborhood through these years as consensus reality disintegrates into conspiracy and other contagions. What unfolds is a rogue retelling of history in which hotdogs debate the culture wars, trashcans preach QAnon, zombies rally for revolution, and real events are refashioned as Broadway bangers from Cats, Les Miserables, Annie, and The Phantom of the Opera. There are songs and dancing, moments of menace and melancholy, shitposting and deep sincerity. Created with Soda Jerk’s signature methodology, Hello Dankness is entirely composed of sampled media. Utilizing extensive rotoscoping and digital VFX, the feature length narrative has been grafted together from almost one thousand film, television and audio sources.
The cast of characters include Tom Hanks, Annette Bening, Bruce Dern, Ice Cube, Wayne and Garth, Maya and Ana, Rue and Jules, Seth Rogen and Reyn Doi. American politicians play themselves, with Jesse Eisenberg in the role of Mark Zuckerberg, and The Phantom of the Opera as Vladimir Putin.
About the Artists
Soda Jerk is an Australian artist duo who make sample-based films with a rogue documentary impulse. They are fundamentally interested in the politics of images; how they circulate, whom they benefit and how they can be undone. They have collaborated on projects with cyberfeminist collective VNS Matrix and electronic music group The Avalanches. Their recent feature Hello Dankness premiered at the Berlinale in 2023 and has received numerous cinema awards including Best Feature at the Atlanta Film Festival and Lausanne Underground Film & Music Festival. It also won the Blackmagic Design Australian Innovation Award and Berwick New Cinema Award, and its theatrical release included an extended run at Film Forum in New York. Hello Dankness follows Soda Jerk’s controversial political revenge fable Terror Nullius, which was disowned by its commissioning body, who called the film “UnAustralian”. The Guardian named the “dizzyingly ambitious satirical work” one of the best Australian films of the decade.
About Orchid Contemporary
This screening is presented in partnership with Orchid Contemporary, an independent DIY art space and gallery located in Hamilton’s East End that was created to highlight underrepresented artists and feature programming that is responsive to surrounding artistic communities. It is run by Adrien Crossman, a Hamilton-based artist, curator, writer and educator.
About Factory Media Centre
Factory Media Centre is Hamilton’s not-for-profit artist-driven resource centre for film, video, new media, installation, sound art, and other multimedia art forms. Our mission is to develop and support a vibrant, sustainable, creative, and diverse community of Members and non-Members within Hamilton and its surrounding region.
This event is made possible thanks to generous funding from the incite Foundation for the Arts, a non profit organization dedicated to revolutionizing support for the arts in the Hamilton Community.
You must be logged in to post a comment.