DIRECTORS STATEMENT

ANATOMIES.COM comes from my fascination with the strange, surreal spaces that can be found on the internet. It's a film that stems from being chronically online from a young age, learning how to desire, joke, fear, and communicate through screens.

In particular, what fascinated me the most about internet culture growing up were the new forms of identity that emerged. The language of digital customisation, namely through social media, photo-editing, and even video game avatars formed a unique kind of digital vernacular for how we represent identity in a post-internet world. These features appear throughout ANATOMIES.COM because they are inseparable from how we experience the world now, even though mainstream cinema still tends to treat the language of the internet as peripheral or invisible.

There is also a sense of the uncanny that is unique to the internet and it's unreal qualities, similarly evoked by phenomena such as analog glitches, dark internet humour, and even old, badly-rendered video games. ANATOMIES.COM is my attempt to explore this quality, and the sense of derealisation that occurs when online and offline life dissolve into one another.

BIO

Oliver Whitehouse is a Chinese-British director & writer based in Sydney (Eora).

His work moves fluidly between mediums, drawing influence from experimental photography, obsolete technology,  and the uncanny aesthetics of the internet. With a visual language marked by a sense of the surreal,  he navigates spaces where memory becomes disembodied, and personal and collective histories coalesce.

His award winning projects, most notably experimental short MYTH (2024) & archival documentary Guangzhou.mp4 (2024)  have screened at numerous insitutions and art galleries across Sydney and worldwide.  

White Rabbit Gallery 'Hooligan' Runner-up | 2025

LEDA Art Prize Finalist | 2025

PARI 'Stain' Exhibit | 2025

Burwood Art Prize Finalist | 2025

Tarkovski Grant | 2025

Cut-Short Grand Prize  | 2024

Inner-West Young Filmmaker winner | 2024 | 2023

UTS Vertigo - Myth / Bloodline | 2024

Inner-West Young Artist winner | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023

Inner-West Young Writer winner | 2021 | 2023