Film Forum

The Australian-born, Brooklyn-based siblings, Soda Jerk, repurpose and collage classic films. They describe their hilariously warped narrative feature, HELLO DANKNESS, as a “political fable that bears witness to the psychotropic spectacle of American politics from 2016 to 2021.” Sampling 500+ clips from movies, television, commercials, memes, and news footage, the film situates our political fissures within a suburban neighborhood inhabited by characters from popular comedies and horror films. Players and trolls from the 2016 election (Clinton, Sanders, Trump, Putin, Zuckerberg, MAGA and QAnon followers) are ingeniously grafted into these scenes to eerily send up the absurdities of American politics today. “A gleeful satire of our strange political times.” – Patrick Brzeski, The Hollywood Reporter

2022     AUSTRALIA     70 MIN.

Reviews

“A fresh and unforgettable cinematic experience. Built from samples of movies, public speeches, famous songs, and even memes… stitched together to create a vivid representation of American culture before and after the 2016 elections... You’ve never seen a film quite like this one before.”
– Marco Vito Oddo, Collider

“There are cool directors, and then there are directors as cool as Soda Jerk, whose films are almost like forbidden fruits. The opening is genius. The viewer is constantly discombobulated. Soda Jerk can be very funny. Pop culture’s infinite cycle always spits out and reassembles content; here the process is explicitly, amplified, and turbocharged.”
– Luke Buckmaster, The Guardian (UK)

“Wacky humor never overwhelms Soda Jerk’s lancing criticism of the American political scene. Blame for the current reactionary stagnation and unease is heaped across the political spectrum.”
– Jeff Reichert, Film Comment