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The smartest account of the past few bizarre, awful years in America is a movie you might not have heard of: Hello Dankness. Its brilliant, its funny, and its made by a two-person team known as Soda JerkAustralian-born siblings Dan and Dominique Angeloro, who are now based in New York. Masters of sampling, theyve distilled our warped political and cultural realityand how its felt to live through itby seamlessly combining clips from movies, news, and memes into a feature-length creation. Film Forum in New York pounced on it for a theatrical run through September 28; The New York Times responded with a Critics Pick. Forget novelty mash-upsHello Dankness just might be a definitive summation of the 2016-2020 saga none of us has really processed.

It was really about how weird that all felt in 2016, the pair said about the rise of Trump. When we embarked on it, we didnt know the pandemic would happen, and we didnt anticipate the shitshow of events that unfolded afterward. They felt the need to set down a record of the eraa psychic ledger. In Hello Dankness, a first encounter with MAGA folk is hilariously portrayed with clips of Tom Hanks (from The Burbs) nervously checking out his new neighbors, an ominous house where a Hillary for Prison sign sits in the window (thanks to Soda Jerks clever digital alterations). Matching different clips, Reyn Doi from Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar pedals along on a bike, delivering newspapers, while Wayne and Garth wander the street, affiliation unknown.

A still from Hello Dankness.

Soda Jerk started in the music and activist worlds of Sydney, after growing up in the suburbs. Appropriation was the move: experimental hip-hop and noisecore, Napster music-sharing, artist squats, and seizing real estate were all fair game. Thats really where our practice emergedthe politics of sampling, they said, calling it a form of civil disobedience. The duo teamed up creatively to make an IP battle royale called Hollywood Burn (2002), then came to New York in 2012, where they found home in the film community. We joined Spectacle Theater collective, which runs a microcinema in Brooklyn, and met a community of cinephiles that have kept us there ever since.

Video installations in museums and galleries first showed Soda Jerks work, but the siblings fixated on feature-length filmmaking with Terror Nullius (2018)a wild anticolonial dismantling of Australian history and culture that one funder called un-Australian. The experience of sustaining a work and an audience at this length was a turning point. People will go to a cinema and watch it from beginning to endnone of this gallery bullshit where they walk in and walk out, they said. Hello Dankness followedincorporating and critiquing Internet influences while expanding to encompass the pandemics abyssand premiered at the prestigious Berlin Film Festival, then New Yorks cutting-edge new fest Prismatic Ground, before the Film Forum run.

A still from Hello Dankness.

Soda Jerk spoke with me over video from a hotel in South Korea, where they were jurors at the Seoul International Womens Film Festival for its 25th edition. Audiences had questions about Hello Dankness, they said, but you realize these things are so collective for so many people. Thats precisely the genius behind Soda Jerks style of sampling: these arent disposable meme-style references, but a harnessing of the expressive power within the original movies to new purposes. In this way, Hello Dankness works on multiple levels. Hankss shuffling haplessness in The Burbs is the perfect look for a well-meaning voter overwhelmed by electoral forces that feel aggressive. The suburban setting bespeaks actual voter bases, according to each characters vibe and manner: Hanks is a Bernie voter, Annette Bening from American Beauty stumps for Hillary, while Wayne and Garth... maybe you dont want to know. Later, dazed daytime scenes from A Nightmare on Elm Street capture the unreality of soldiering on in the face of the pandemic and, well, everything else.

Creating Hello Dankness was a constant process of clip-and-idea formation, with the timeline of current events providing a spine. We have these whiteboards in our studio, representing the different acts and chapters, and theyre constantly being reworked in terms of plotlines, Soda Jerk said. Genre films were effective for representing the complete rupture to the everyday. Stoner postapocalyptic comedy This Is the End, for example, gets new life by representing the shock of Trumps 2016 victory.

The artistic teamwork of Soda Jerk feels inspiredand inspiring. Were both in the studio every day. Cutting the edit, doing all of the sampling and generative stuff together. (I manage to coax out one difference: Dan rotoscopesthe act of digitally masking footage in a sample frame-by-frametill the cows come home, but hates doing emails.) Next up: a joyous Big gay film. They welcome the change of pace. Hello Dankness has a vexed relationship to hope, the pair said. We dont even know if hope is the thing we need right now. Hope doesnt kick your ass. Words to live by in these timesand with Hello Dankness, a visual vocabulary to make sense of it all.

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