Screening on
Mon 12 May 18:00
at Atlas cinema
On Analog, A videotape from Guangzhou, the Killer from Australia
In the murky margins of China's 1980s media boom, the VHS tape emerged as both portal and provocation. As bootlegged foreign films flooded the grey market, state-owned studios scrambled to respond—not with celluloid, but with magnetic tape. Thus was born the video-tape films: low-budget, high-drama genre pieces shot on Betacam, circulated via video rental shops, cable TV, and provincial screening rooms.
Tonight, we present Killer from Australia 澳洲杀手 (1990), a pulp thriller resurrected from Guangzhou-based artist and publisher Qin Dao’s 烂片 (literally “trash films”) collection—a project that salvages and re-contextualizes these forgotten films that remain largely unarchived, uncatalogued, and unloved.
Unfolding at the intersection of failed industrial ambition and market opportunism, Killer from Australia is emblematic of the brief, volatile era in which China’s cinema culture splintered and metastasized into video.
Killer from Australia 澳洲杀手
Dir. Arslan Abdukerim / China / 1990 / 74min
Billed as an “international crime film,” Killer from Australia is a delirious tale of transnational murder and family betrayal. A Russian-Chinese family—played entirely by ethnic Han actors—is infiltrated by the ferocious Australian assassin Varoga posing as their long-lost son. What follows is a genre-bending chase involving caviar, harmonicas, and a treasured heirloom known as the “Golden Bear.”
Spanning from the dislocations of the Cultural Revolution to imagined zones of exile and Soviet-coded intrigue, the film ricochets between national myth and pulp invention.
Screening alongside a series of trailers created for the 烂片 project, followed by a conversation with Qin Dao and Bo Wang on the afterlives of VHS cinema and alternative non-institutional modes to archiving.
Digitalisation supported by Pan Lu
Online Archive: https://www.instagram.com/badfilmdisco/
Artist bio
Qin Dao is an artist, filmmaker and publisher based in Guangzhou, China. He is the owner of On Kino – a self-claimed film theatre, video screening room and a moving image archive all in one. Since 2017, On Kino has organised regular screening programs that comprise rare, forgotten, or orphan films on 16mm, 35mm, 8.75mm, super 8 or VHS formats, most of which have been discovered by Qin Dao himself. In addition to On Kino, Qin Dao’s practice also includes exhibitions, publications, and printmaking.
Bo Wang (b. 1982, Chongqing, China) is an artist, filmmaker and researcher currently based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.