Meet The Filmmaker: Matt Bissett-Johnson [2023]
Meet The Filmmaker: Matt Bissett-Johnson
Touchdown, Planet MBJ!
Matt Bissett-Johnson has been submitting inscrutably bizarre, off-the-wall micro gems for quite some time. The first iterations arrived as little expeditions from reality that appeared to be animated on post-it notes. Featuring characters that look like dystopic extras from a world populated by bugs, experimental beasts rejected by the gods as unfit to go forward for evolution and hyper-active creatures with uncertain limbs and even less certain agendas, they all bristle with a barely constrained hyper-energy fuelled by direct-into-veins caffeine and the ergs that pulsate off substances that glow in the dark and do double-time as the baseline source of the special powers for dubious super heroes.
Matt’s first films didn’t make the cut for those earlier MIAF’s but he didn’t get discouraged. Every year they poured in and they got better and better. Then one made it into a Late Night Bizarre program and the audience LOVED it. He never looked back. As the years ticked by, a bit more technical polish came to the production values and the ideas just kept getting better and stranger.
It’s too early for a retrospective but it’s definitely time to take stock of a young Australian animator who is carving out an utterly unique niche in the animation screenscape… and what better time to do it than a Friday night.
We will screen a selection of his films from the back catalogues (might even add in a couple that didn’t make the cut way back in the day) and we’ll sit Matt down if we can get him to stay still long enough and start by asking him how it all came to this.
Pyramid Of Despair
Matt Bissett-Johnson
Australia, 1’16, 2023
This session is classified: Unclassified (M) Mature, not recommended for viewers under 15 years.
Please note that Backlot is NOT fully accessible. There are stairs with handrails, but no lift to the second floor where the cinema is located.