While vandalizing a private girls high school late at night, image conscious 15 year old Simon and his friends are caught off guard by a gang of the very people they are trying to emulate. The boys then call the police in a clumsy attempt to seek justice.

Director’s Vision

Hard Rubbish is a short film about image and the lengths we will go to construct it. In 2003 I was 15 and like many youths, I had no idea who I was or where I was supposed to fit into the world. What I did know was that I loved punk music and the culture surrounding it. I styled myself after Sid Vicious, Johnny Rotten and the other knights of a bygone musical era. They knew who they were and they owned it. This film aims to portray the all too familiar teenage quest for affirmation and acceptance through image, and the inevitable pains that come with it.

Living out our punk rock fantasy, my friends and I would commit petty vandalism and graffiti on the streets of our upper-middle class suburbs, trying to fulfill our idea of what adolescence was supposed to be about. It felt like I was robbing myself of an essential ‘growing up’ experience if I didn’t reenact the youthful destruction I saw in films. So on the night of the events in Hard Rubbish, what happened to us was a perfectly fitting lesson. We were brutally put in our place by the very men we were trying to emulate.

You don’t choose your life lessons, often at the time you don’t even realize you are learning them. My friends and I were pretending to be something that we weren’t and in its own funny way the world exposed us for what we actually were: privileged young men who really didn’t have a whole lot to be angry about.