Hello Dankness
Sat Dec 13:
$15 General Admission
$10 Student/Child/Senior
$7 NWFF Member
Soda Jerk
Australia
2022
1h 10m
About
(Soda Jerk, 2022, Australia, 70 min, in English)
Hello Dankness is a political fable that bears witness to the psychotropic spectacle of American politics from 2016 to 2021, and the mythologies and lore that took root around it. Taking form as a suburban stoner musical, the film follows a neighborhood through these years as consensus reality disintegrates into conspiracy and other contagions. What unfolds is a rogue retelling of history in which hotdogs debate the culture wars, trashcans preach QAnon, zombies rally for revolution, and real events are refashioned as Broadway bangers from Cats, Les Miserables, Annie, and The Phantom of the Opera. There are songs and dancing, moments of menace and melancholy, shitposting and deep sincerity. Created with Soda Jerk’s signature methodology, Hello Dankness is entirely composed of sampled media. Utilizing extensive rotoscoping and digital VFX, the feature length narrative has been grafted together from almost one thousand film, television and audio sources.
Begun in 2016 and labored on throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, Hello Dankness is a record of the time, written from the time. Premiering at the Berlinale in 2023, it went on to win numerous cinema awards including Best Feature at the Atlanta Film
Festival and Lausanne Underground Film & Music Festival, as well as the Blackmagic Design Australian Innovation Award and the Berwick New Cinema Award. The Hollywood Reporter announced Hello Dankness as ”the most original and bizarrely elevating movie of the 2023 Berlin International Film Festival”, and the Guardian and Time Out published 4 and 5 star reviews. In New York, Hello Dankness played an extended theatrical run at Manhattan’s iconic Film Forum and was praised with reviews from the The New York Times and Brooklyn Rail.
The cast of characters include Tom Hanks, Annette Bening, Bruce Dern, Ice Cube, Wayne and Garth, Maya and Ana, Rue and Jules, Seth Rogen and Reyn Doi. American politicians play themselves, with Jesse Eisenberg in the role of Mark Zuckerberg, and The Phantom of the Opera as Vladimir Putin
Click for Accessibility Info
Ticketing, concessions, cinemas, restrooms, and our public edit lab are located on Northwest Film Forum’s ground floor, which is wheelchair accessible. All doors in Northwest Film Forum are non-motorized, and may require staff assistance to open. Our upstairs workshop room is not wheelchair accessible.
The majority of seats in our main cinema are 21″ wide from armrest to armrest; some seats are 19″ wide. We are working on creating the option of removable armrests!
We have a limited number of assistive listening devices available for programs hosted in our larger theater, Cinema 1. These devices are maintained by the Technical Director, and can be requested at the ticketing and concessions counter. Also available at the front desk is a Sensory Kit you can borrow, which includes a Communication Card, noise-reducing headphones, and fidget toys.
The Forum does NOT have assistive devices for the visually impaired, and is not (yet) a scent-free venue. Our commitment to increasing access for our audiences is ongoing, and we welcome all public input on the subject!
If you have additional specific questions about accessibility at our venue, please contact our Patron Services Manager at suji@nwfilmforum.org. Our phone number (206-329-2629) is voicemail-only, but we check it often.
Made possible due to a grant from Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, in partnership with Sensory Access, our Sensory Access document presents a visual and descriptive walk-through of the NWFF space. View it in advance of attending an in-person event at bit.ly/nwffsocialnarrativepdf, in order to prepare yourself for the experience.
⚠️ COVID-19 Policies ⚠️
NWFF patrons are encouraged to wear masks that cover both nose and mouth while in the building. Disposable masks are available at the door for those who need them. Recent variants of COVID-19 readily infect and spread between individuals regardless of vaccination status.
Read more about NWFF’s policies regarding cleaning, masks, and capacity limitations here.
