Shortwave: A different kind of cinema
Published
At a time where algorithms increasingly flatten creativity, Shortwave offers something rarer – a deliberate encounter with the unexpected. Established in 2021, it gives artists the freedom to experiment with the moving image, expanding and evolving their practice, functioning less as a traditional film festival and more like a living, breathing artists laboratory.
Where artists find new forms
The relationship between the performing arts and the screen is as old as cinema itself. At the Sydney Opera House, it stretches back to our opening in 1973 when the Playhouse served as an arthouse cinema.
Today, that legacy continues with Shortwave. In just five years since its launch, the program has commissioned more than thirty short films, often in partnership with community arts organisations and independent producers.
For the 2026 season, we’re premiering five films from some of Australia’s most exciting contemporary artists. This is your ticket to step into their most experimental work yet.
From an artist’s view
We spoke to Gamilaroi and Darug artist Travis De Vries about the experience of creating his film In The Forest I Found Myself. He told us:
Shortwave has given me a chance to bring a very personal part of my creative practice to new audiences in a new way. And there’s a level of recognition and cultural weight that comes with being presented at the Sydney Opera House.
My work often circles ideas of First Nations spirituality in a contemporary or future-facing context. I’m interested in what happens when old knowledge, instinct, memory and Country exist alongside modern isolation, technology, anxiety and disconnection.
There’s a repeated idea of being called into the forest. For me, the forest becomes both a physical place and a psychological one. It is Country, it is memory, it is the unknown, and it is also the self. The story I wanted to tell was about the moment where boundaries start to collapse — between fear and desire, between the real and the spiritual, between the person you think you are and the thing you might become if you stop running from it.
It’s about fear, intuition, and the possibility that the things we’re scared of might also be trying to show us something.
Witness what screen can do
Here, film serves as an extension of their voice. No matter the medium they’re best known for, Shortwave gives artists the freedom to test, stretch and reimagine their practice through a new lens.
Many of the artists in the program are working with screen for the first time; others are taking the opportunity to go deeper, pushing into new territory and techniques. What emerges is a body of work that doesn’t conform to traditional filmmaking approaches. It’s consistently surprising and continues to challenge our assumptions about what film can and should be.
– Stuart Buchanan, Head of Screen
The films
Echo Sleep (2026)
Saigon via Melbourne artist Passive Kneeling’s Echo Sleep (2026) examines the erosion of consent in our media-saturated lives, where images imprint themselves whether we choose them or not. Co-commissioned with Soft Centre, the film uses 3D environments, creative coding and TouchDesigner to unfold a looping first-person perspective that gradually slips into imagined spaces.
In The Forest I Found Myself (2026)
Co-commissioned with Awesome Black, Gamilaroi and Darug artist Travis De Vries’ In the Forest I Found Myself interrogates the act of looking itself. It constructs a quietly destabilising work that sits between psychological study and cosmic horror. Drawing on First Nations perspectives alongside genre traditions, the film lingers in ambiguity. As it traces a fragmented dialogue between artist and psychiatrist, knowledge begins to feel provisional and perception can no longer be trusted.
A BEING, OF COURSE (2026)
Co-commissioned with Music In Exile, the collaboration between Fetle Wondimu Nega & Kalu Oji traces an emotional terrain where grief is not resolved but continually shaped. Shot on 16mm and underscored by a richly textured sonic landscape as live coding, voice and field recordings build on the analogue qualities of the film, A Being, Of Course asks: how can loss reconfigure identity over time?
Silver Tongues (2026)
Drawing from Kūki Airani cosmology, Morgan Hogg’s Silver Tongues transports you into the avaiki (underworld) of the Momokē. Co-commissioned with Blacktown Arts, the film blends performance, mythology and moving image, exploring themes of cultural inheritance, displacement and spiritual passage. Hogg’s practice, grounded in oral histories and community knowledge finds new expression here, where ancestral narratives are reimagined through contemporary visual language.
Poetry By Design (2026)
In Poetry By Design, multidisciplinary artist NMMWL (Nyaluak Leth) turns the camera inward, crafting a cinematic self-portrait that travels through poetry, performance and reflection. Born in South Sudan and raised in Australia, their work draws on lived experience to explore the complexities of identity, memory and transformation. Co-commissioned with Red Room Poetry, the film moves between protest and prayer, blurring the line between performance and ritual.
Dare to experience something different
Each year, Shortwave proves the breadth of what cinema can hold. From digital surrealism, psychological inquiry, spiritual reckoning and poetic self-examination, it opens the room for risk, new ideas and for practices that might not otherwise find a home on screen. Each artist moves beyond narrative into consciousness, from documentation into analysis. And in the audience, it’s a chance to engage with art that invites new ways of seeing.
If you’re looking to step outside the familiar, we say – stay curious with Shortwave and see where it leads you.
Available to watch on Sydney Opera House YouTube channel for free.
This work was commissioned by Sydney Opera House for the Shortwave Program, enabled by The Skrzynski Foundation and Sydney Opera House New Work Now donors.