Belly Up — Rita Bullwinkel

At the intersection of the real and the surreal, Belly Up captures the messiness of human behaviour, the absurd always tethered to a recognisable reality.

Ranging from the macabre to the tender, the playful to the shocking, these stories are interlinked by moments of shape-shifting and enchantment, as characters question the bodies they’ve been given and what their bodies require to be sustained: teenage girls morph into plants, gulag prisoners perform makeshift surgery and a child licks exposed electric wires, turning their tongue black.

Visceral, cinematic and deeply human, Belly Up is full of the variety of the world and reveals Rita Bullwinkel to be an audacious and original talent.