A retrospective based on an introspective vision, this stream of still pictures, unfolding to the rhythm of the voice-over (delivered by Steve Reinke), portrays a man who visually exposes his psychological “faults.” Recounting eighteen decisive moments in his life, and dissecting both his...
'Amy, is narrated by a model (Liisa Repo-Martell) who’s painfully uncomfortable with her own body and “old woman’s” face. Astonishing closing image is a tightly composed telephoto shot on the start of a marathon race among young schoolgirls, dashing toward and then across the screen in...
Made at the international film school in Cuba (EICTV) at the start of the rainy season. A tender re-examination of bodies from the first generation of Artificial Intelligence robots programmed with a full range of emotions. Electronic revolt and resistance. Secret messages encoded within robot...
A man faces his approaching death. He takes a journey, his last perhaps, and ends up at the Pensão Globo in Lisbon, where he sets out on aimless excursions through the city. The film depicts a life in a state of transition. Sometimes it's like I'm already gone, become a ghost of myself.
"In Mexico, experimental filmmakers Hoolboom and Steve Sanguedolce set out to dissect the travel bug. Hoolboom's deadpan, incisive voice-over offers the viewer the air-tight experience of a Third World holiday, while images from an archaeological museum to a bullfight to an auto factory establish...
“After the death of my mother, I began a suite of women superstar portraits. They were scientists, poets and activists, a second family busy inventing new forms of relationship, even of social organisation. From alternative rockers to radical ecologists, their stories narrate a feminist...
Shot in the subway during the summer and fall of 2016, each subject appears for a minute, 69 in all, one for each of Toronto’s subway stops. Serial portraits in black and white.
In a series of simple frames, the often misunderstood practice of Zen takes shape as basketball bliss. Now in retirement, the greatest defensive player of the amateur leagues continues to practice on a remote island, far from the madding crowds. His techniques and dedication undergo continual...
In a suite of interviews for his “second first feature” Godard submitted to the slings and arrows of North American media interrogators with polite hostility and a bristling intelligence. Here, the briefest chitchat is rendered in eight parts, which sees the maestro declaim on spectacle,...
A hybrid of DeSade and Dali, House of Pain is a nightmare that takes place between sleep and death, where the performers appear as mute hallucinations. The film features a hallucinogenic blend of the domestic and perverse.
Personal film essay about two pandemics: AIDS and Coronavirus. Body memorials, survivor stories, remembrances. Both plagues are reframed by neoliberalism and its central mythology of personal freedom, brilliantly laid out in Hito Steyerl’s essay gem “Freedom from Everything” which is adapted...
For more than two decades Mike Hoolboom has been one of our foremost artistic witnesses of the plague of the twentieth century, HIV. A personal voice documenting and piercing the clichéd spectrum of Living With AIDS from carnal abjection to incandescent spirituality, no surviving moving image...
Mike Hoolboom reflects in 27 brief scenes on the life of his father, who died in June 2017. Using home movies, snapshots and found footage, he creates a portrait of a exceedingly clever, yet evanescent father figure haunted by the war that sent his own father to a concentration camp. Ultimately the...
Simon Weil wrote that attention is the rarest kind of generosity. How to extend this generosity to a single photograph, made in 1949 in the port city of Haifa, in the new state of Israel? There are three soldiers from the Haganah watching over a Palestinian father and his three sons. Each face has...
How to say good-bye to friends? How to keep from becoming a ghost in the old streets of the Czech Republic, at once too strange and familiar? Let’s step inside the old scenes of love (which are also the prelude to love’s betrayal) before animal rescue can offer consolations. Shot on the closing...
A four-part bio-pic that narrates moments from the lives of Fats Waller, Jackson Pollock, Janieta Eyre and Frida Khalo. This quartet of hauntologies reframes the cruel reductions of biography to focus on death and doubles. Repurposing archival texts (the diaries of Khalo, the testimonies of...
A monologue about AIDS, rendered in split-screens generously furbished with images from Terminator 2, science flicks, Michael Jackson and home movies. The opening section of Panic Bodies (70 minutes 1998).
