VIOLENT YOUTH: Short Films Curated by Angus McGrath

VIOLENT YOUTH is a program of short films and video works tracing countless ways that art, violence and juvenility intersect to trouble social order. This is also the NSW premiere of the 2026 short (I Saw You) Shine, written/directed by Angus McGrath and starring Kashif Sheikh, Bruce Koussaba, Priya Leigh and Laura Luciana. (I Saw You) Shine will be introduced by sci-fi writer and academic Emma Rayward.

FULL PROGRAM

A Day With The Boys, directed by Clu Gulager (1969)

Dialogue, video documentation of performance action by Xiao Lu (1989)

Gerorist, directed by Shozin Fukui (1986)

Justice - Stress music video, directed by Romain Gavras (2008)

Meat Joy, video documentation of performance by Carolee Schneeman (1964)

(I Saw You) Shine, directed by Angus McGrath (2026)

Programmed by Angus McGrath, these films think about the ways extremity, youth culture, and violence have been aestheticised, fretted-over, and dissected since the emergence of the teenager after World War 2, consistently challenging respectable order. To this end, theatre-maker Giselle Vienne speaks on how the intensity of youth is overlooked: 'As a teenager… your body can be a battleground between normative political society and your own personal experience. Your body becomes defined by systems of power, like gender, and this cultural violence is so often downplayed as being caused by raging hormones.' VIOLENT YOUTH sees a rejection of social norms and safety from children through to young adults, spanning music videos for French electro house, New York’s hippy-esque Happenings, Chinese performance art in the weeks before the Tiananmen Square massacre, and apathetic terrorists of today. 

Total runtime approx. 70 mins.

The films in this program are unrated, and contain nudity, depictions of violence, sexual harassment, and vomiting.