What is the meaning of life? To 25-year-old Justin Hughes, the meaning of life certainly isn’t living in the matrix, working a mundane nine-to-five and coming home to watch television. Instead, Hughes spends his time bombing Connex-operated Hitachis along the Upfield line, racking Nikes from Rebel—”you’ve got to have the freshest Nikes,” Hughes constantly reminds the sold-out audience at ACMI—and smoking cannabis out of a burnt plastic gatorade bong, a habit he admits does his reputation no favors with the audience.

There was an electric feeling in the foyer of ACMI, as friends of KINOTOPIA—Digby Houghton and Andrew Tabacco’s arthouse newsletter—celebrated the launch of their first printed magazine, Katies. To coincide with the launch, the pair facilitated a screening of Eddie Martin’s 2005 cult documentary Jisoe. The founders had to transfer the screening from ACMI’s Cinema One to the larger Cinema Two after the demand for the event far exceeded expectations. This came as no surprise. As Houghton highlighted in his opening remarks, Jisoe is a rite of passage to so many who grew up in Melbourne; it introduced so many to the subcultures of graffiti and street art and illustrated a city that “certainly isn’t the same one that was so recently awarded greatest city in the world by Time Out.”

Jisoe follows a year of the aforementioned Hughes’ life as a graffiti writer navigating trainyard notoriety, fatherhood and the Victorian justice system. At points throughout the screening, the 168-person audience became lively, as classic Hughes lines rang out before  a crowd that had previously only watched the film alone on YouTube in their teenage years. Martin’s work is as much a bleak comedy as it is a recount of Hughes’ fall from grace. Beyond teaching the audience how to avoid paying their full fare at Flinders St station—Hughes’ hand of death remark (holding the gate barriers open with his hands to let commuters through) inviting an avalanche of laughter from the audience—much of Martin’s work follows Hughes’ slow descent into mental turmoil.

Martin’s linear storytelling presents an existential nihilistic angle; what is the meaning of life when the anarchist alternative that Hughes has chosen for his own life is equally as meaningless as the conformist nine-to-fiver lifestyle? Hughes himself often questions this to the audience. What is the point of painting trains? What is the point of smoking cannabis daily? What is the point of getting clean? Why bother getting a job? Why did I receive a two year prison sentence when my mates received community corrections orders?

Although that last question was perhaps steeped in misguided anger instead of philosophical wisdom, there are many worthwhile perspectives to be taken from Martin’s work. One could argue that it is these very perspectives that see contemporary screenings of Jisoe continue to sell out 20 years later.