Call Me An Ambulance:

Badlands
David Blumenstein, Australia, 2006, 1 min. English with English Subtitles

The Dark, Krystle
Michael Robinson, USA, 2014, 10 min. English with English Subtitles

Terror Nullius
Soda Jerk, Australia, 2018, 53 min. English with English Subtitles

Curated by Bartholomew Sammut

One of the central pleasures of curating for XPOSED lay in the research itself: driving through the treasure troves of festival archives and the labyrinthine pathways of the internet in search of works both overlooked and ripe for rediscovery. It meant returning to older films not simply to showcase them, but to reframe them, allowing familiar narratives to be read anew under shifting cultural and aesthetic lenses.

Our greatest excitement arose when we encountered films that synthesized these impulses—works that transformed archival fragments and found materials into something at once poetic, irreverent, and sharply funny. This program brings together an early satire, a melodramatic pastiche, and a film once described by an Australian organization as “distinctly un-Australian”—a label that, in retrospect, led us to discover it.

These films are animated through found and re-appropriated footage. They elevate a queer approach to storytelling, bringing the fabulous drama we so desperately crave and that all important re-appropriation of not-so-well-known queer classics.

From a tossed piece of cheese leading improbably to an ill-fated romance to Alexis’s relentless drinking and Krystel’s unending tears, these films unfold within worlds where minorities and animals collude, and where familiar hierarchies are gleefully overturned ensuring, at last, that the not-so-nice white guys finish last.