TERROR NULLIUS

Part political satire, part eco-horror, part 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 organization just days prior to the film’s premiere in 2018. Offended by its politics, 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.

TERROR NULLIUS is presented as part of the program An Other Cinema: Apparatus and Histories, curated by Lukas Brasiskis and designed to precede the online symposium The State of the Moving Image (September 17–19).

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.