Roger Ballen’s Theatre of the Mind

Executive Producer: Roger Ballen
Producer: Tanja Bruckner
Creative Director: Marguerite Rossouw
Actors: WART, Peter O’Brien, Peter Leatherby, Aime Smith, Sylvester Kassel, Pricilla Bourne
Sound Design: Shaun Hay
Post Production and Editing: Tanja Bruckner, Andrew Robinson
Special thanks: Liam Garstang, Colin Rhodes, Matthew Krouse, Paul Denny
A Collaboration with Sydney College of the Arts Students and Aliumni: Dylan Batty, Priscilla Bourne, Nick Dorey, Richard Kean, Ryan Brennan, Daisy Knight, Georgina Macneil, Simon Bare, Nikki Walkerden, Tanja Bruckner

Presenting Roger Ballen’s latest video, Roger Ballen’s Theatre of the Mind, a psychological thriller set in a zone between sanity and insanity, dream and reality, the film takes Ballen’s work to the next level.

Haunting and intense, it begins with the world famous photographer giving a lecture on his work. In midstream his narrative is interrupted and he is dragged to dungeon-like asylum where caverns of horror are opened up revealing its inmates.

Filmed in underground tunnels, built in 19th Century Australia to house the mentally insane, the work is, in a word, ‘Ballenesque’.

Theatre of the Mind is directed by Roger Ballen, produced by Tanja Bruckner, with artistic direction by Marguerite Rossouw and with sound design by Shaun Hay.

The work follows Ballen’s hugely acclaimed video I Fink U Freeky, made with Zef pop group Die Antwoord in 2012 that, to date, has garnered 80-million hits on YouTube. Ballen’s more recent videos include Asylum of the Birds (2014) and Roger Ballen’s Outland (2015), created with artistic director Marguerite Rossouw and director Ben Crossman.