Sam Smith

Hitch a ride into the dark heart of Australia with Soda_Jerk's TERROR NULLIUS, a blistering, badly behaved sample-based film that confronts the horror of our contemporary moment. Equal parts political satire, eco-horror and road movie, TERROR NULLIUS is a rogue remapping of national mythology, where a misogynistic remark is met with the sharp beak of a bird, feminist bike gangs rampage and bicentenary celebrations are ravaged by flesh-eating sheep. By intricately remixing fragments of Australia's pop culture and film legacy, TERROR NULLIUS interrogates the unstable entanglement of fiction that underpins this country's vexed sense of self.

An experimental documentary shot on the Swedish island of Gotland. It mines historical data, mingling it with speculative fictions, to chronicle different chapters embedded to the island's geological strata. Working with locals to ground the film's investigations within the myriad communities of Gotland, Smith seeks to re-imagine our modes of engagement with and contributions to ecological assemblages. Scanning the landscape characterised by palaeo-sea-stacks, fossil coastlines, concrete production plants and limestone quarries, the film focuses a lens on minerals circulated in economic, cultural and agricultural contexts.

Mimicking the hyperbolic rhetoric of today’s copyright cops, Hollywood Burn pits a righteous league of video pirates against the evil tyrant Moses and his Copyright Commandments. Determined to alter the present by changing the past, the pirates travel back to 1955 to construct the ultimate weapon: an Elvis Presley video-clone. Part sci-fi + rom com + biblical epic + action movie, this free-culture manifesto adopts the tactical responses of the parasite, feeding off the body of Hollywood and inhabiting its cinematic structures and codes. The unwitting all-star cast includes Elvis Presley, Charlton Heston, Monkey, Batman, Bette Davis, Jaws, Jesus, The Hulk, The Hoff and the Ghostbusters.

Filmed on the volcanic island of Gotland, Sweden, the work unites myth, body and landscape when a raincoated dancer is stunned by an encounter with a floating, living, rotating rock.

Glass occupies a position between fluidity and stasis – an amorphous element, integral in the production of moving images and architectural vistas, that actively distorts and transforms light. Filmed in a glass blowing factory, the interiors of Le Corbusier’s 1923 Villa Le Lac, and the surrounds of southwest Switzerland, The Horizontal Window intercuts two contrasting aspect ratios that parallel the primary apertures of Villa Le Lac: an 11-meter ribbon window facing Lake Geneva and a smaller, squarer unglazed frame cut into the exterior garden wall.

Comprised entirely of hundreds of pirated film samples, Hello Dankness is a bent suburban musical that bears witness to the psychotropic cultural spectacle of the period 2016 to 2021. Set in the American suburbs, the film follows a neighbourhood through these years as consensus reality disintegrates into conspiracies and other political contagions. Part political satire, zombie stoner film, and Greek tragedy, the work is also informed by the encrypted memetics of contemporary internet culture.

For the Love of Corals is a cinematic inquiry that focuses on the daily labour of caring for endangered beings to resuscitate them from their imminent human-induced extinction. The technology of the ad hoc laboratory; scientific knowledge; the complexity of marine ecologies; and the intimacy of providing care converge in the precision of sustaining coral IVF. Whilst keeping the coral in captivity is, dishearteningly, the fundamental condition of Craggs’ research, the scientists and the coral also become entangled in sharing a space for living, working and world-making, expanding the range of possible worlds in common.

E.1027 is a performance based on the complex history and imagined future of Irish architect and designer Eileen Gray’s eponymous villa. A history of conflict, etched within the building’s material structure, plays out in episodes of companionship, obsession, murder and destruction. The work actively seeks to diminish the importance of Le Corbusier within this narrative, whose obsessive relationship with Gray’s villa is encaptured in his vandalistic murals that were painted directly onto the walls of the house.

After a demon arrives at her workplace, a tired retail worker expects to find help within the Department of Paranormal Activity, only to be thrown into a bureaucratic maze instead.