May Day, 2011. Krakow, Poland. Koori and Lebanese art student Thelema Louise (not her real name) is locked up in one of Poland's infamous drunk tanks while holidaying with friends from London. Thelema can’t remember how she ended up there or why, and she struggles to make sense of the dehumanising institution with its strange staff and baffling policies. The problem is much bigger than a language barrier: it’s history-deep and world-wide. Soon Thelema’s isolation and mental health issues collude with the ghosts of her past to distort her reality as she spirals into destruction. To resist losing herself entirely, Thelema retreats inwards, drawing on family history, cultural lore and heavy metal lyrics for strength. Scenes from Thelema’s art school project, inspired by Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring, are spliced through the story, along with a Greek chorus of Thelema’s grandmothers keeping watch over her. Based on true events but distorted beyond the believable, ‘Last Rites of Spring’ is a surreal and nightmarish meditation on the prison industrial complex across time and space and the carceral cultures that sustain it, and a philosophical life-or-death battle between sovereignty and submission.