Australia is a country with no constitutionally enshrined freedom of speech, necessitating case-by-case precedents to set the limits of public disclosure. This year is shaping up to be a defining moment in whether Australia sees itself as a country that rewards people speaking out against wrongdoing, or one that censors free speech to save government embarrassment and in which, in the words of David McBride, ‘only truth-tellers get punished’.

SUFF seeks to program independent international and local films that won’t make it to a cinema. But this does not mean that they are all low-budget, lo-fi or unheard of. ‘We’ve had films from Cannes, we’ve had films from Berlin and South By Southwest – these are films that have played at major world festivals – it’s not the sideshow part of the film festival. Here, they are marginalised.’

The use of animals in performance art is nothing new. Nitsch himself has been performing iterations of 150.Action since the 1960s, the heyday of the short-lived but influential Viennese Actionist movement, whose works were grounded in nakedness, violence and destruction, and which often breached obscenity laws and provoked widespread moral outrage. Recent examples are just as easy to point at.