Free Film Screening of Hello Dankness

Head to the Wollongong Art Gallery for a free film screening of SodaJerk’s Hello Dankness.

In keeping with the themes of Shape Shifters, this screening invites us to expand our understanding of the various ways artists use found media to comment on the contexts and conditions that produce popular media. Soda Jerk extends the method of collage to film, sampling almost one thousand film, television and audio sources to create a poignant reflection of the times. As they write:

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.

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. After a decade living and working in New York, they have recently relocated to Europe. Soda Jerk have exhibited extensively within the fields of art and experimental cinema.

Hello Dankness (2022) premiered at the Berlinale in 2023 and won numerous cinema awards including Best Feature at the Atlanta Film Festival and Lausanne Underground Film & Music Festival, as well as the Blackmagic Design Australian Innovation Award at the Melbourne International Film Festival. Hello Dankness follows their controversial political revenge fable Terror Nullius (2018), named by The Guardian as one of the best Australian movies of the decade.

This film is Unclassified (recommended that viewers under the age of 15 be accompanied by a parent or legal guardian).