Search The Archive

Search the film archive

"A provocatively esoteric hodgepodge of human endeavour ... wonderfully difficult to categorize, making it avant-garde to a T." – Film Comment

In an underground lair in an unspecified location, atomic physicist Xia Huang rules with an iron fist. Desperate to finish construction of a particle accelerator that will allow her to understand the very fundaments of existence, her own certainties are disrupted by the arrival of her incestuous teenage siblings and the haunting reminders of the land above that they bring.

A genre-defying, language-blurring, dream-kissed reverie of a film, The Unity of All Things is a disruptive, unclassifiable cinematic theory of everything. Shooting on 8mm and 16mm, filmmaker Daniel Schmidt (co-director, A History of Mutual Respect, MIFF 2011) and artist Alexander Carver have created an entrancing exercise in audiovisual textures and impossible narrative leaps. This is experimental filmmaking in its purest form: a sensory odyssey to the outer rim of human understanding.

"A bizarre, gentle and lyrical meld of sci-fi, incest and pantheism." – Slant