Australian Pop Culture REMIXX!

Every Friday this Summer, Epsilon Spires transforms the parking lot into an outdoor cinema!

Picture a picnic under the stars with your friends where you are entertained by innovative films projected on the big screen. Our programming celebrates cinema past and present, both popular and experimental, highlighting diverse creative voices from around the world. Space is limited and advanced booking encouraged!

July 2nd, Australian Pop Culture REMIXX! 

Cuisine by Moon & Stars offering handmade artisanal Columbian arepas made from heirloom corn grown in Vermont using regenerative farming processes

Part political satire, eco-horror and road movie, TERROR NULLIUS (2018, 54 mins) is a political revenge fable constructed entirely from samples pirated from the Australian cinema cannon. Binding together a documentary impulse with alot of 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-zombies are recast as anti-colonial insurgents and the women of Antipodean cinema go vigilante on Mel Gibson. Working within and against the official archive, Soda Jerk's feature remix film 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 left-wing politics, the Ian Potter's Board of Trustees described the work as "a very controversial piece of art" and even "unAustralian". The Guardian named the dizzyingly ambitious satirical work one of the best Australian films of the decade. 

Tonight's program also features Soda Jerk’s short: The Was (2016, 14 mins). A collaboration with music sampling masters; The Avalanches, that was constructed from over a hundred film and television clips. The result offers a psychedelic detour through the summertime neighbourhoods of collective memory.

"The film's title refers to Captain Cook's declaration upon European settlement in Australia that indigenous customs were meaningless and able to be disregarded ("terra nullius"), and every second of the film, as a litany of aspects from different movies in the Australian canon are deconstructed and reassembled to interrogate the gap between whitewashed, recorded history, and those that were left behind." -Mackenzie Lukenbill, Screen Slate

"TERROR NULLIUS, takes on settler colonialism, racism, and misogyny with a punk frankness that prompted one of its funders to pull their association with the project, calling it “un-Australian.” -Leo Goldsmith, Art Forum