TERROR NULLIUS
dir. Soda_Jerk, 2018
53 mins. Australia
In English.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 8 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, JANUARY 22 – 5 PM
THURSDAY, JANUARY 27 – 7:30 PM

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 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 feature remix offers an incendiary un-writing of Australian national mythologies.

Funded by the Ian Potter Moving Image Commission in 2016, TERROR NULLIUS was notoriously disowned by the organisation just days prior to the film’s premiere in 2018. Offended by its politics, the Ian Potter’s conservative 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.

TERROR NULLIUS was commissioned by ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image)