Panic Bodies

Dear Madonna

Jason returns with another letter to Madonna, thanking her for letting him be her "mistress".

Beacon

BEACON is a montage of location shots filmed at ten different places around the world. These sites are connected by the fact that each is located by the sea. Seamlessly combining travelogue footage and appropriated clips from feature films, BEACON produces a single, imaginary locale. Distant echoes of stories of the sea mingle with the banality of today's touristy beachlife. In its collage of places of expectation and with its seductive prospects of the sea, Beacon sets off on a journey with no distinct destination.

Vacancy

Brasília, the "city of hope", "the ultimate utopia of the 20th century" , is being conserved as a cultural heritage today. It is a place as old as the filmmaker. Segments of amateur footage and of feature films shot on location in the early sixties are inserted in his 1998 travelogue. The utopian city as represented in "Vacancy" is a place abandoned from its inhabitants, a museum kept alive by its staff only.

Frank's Cock

A gay man reminisces about his deceased lover, a victim of AIDS.

Pensão Globo

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.

3 Dreams of Horses

Film is made out of gelatin that comes from horses. They’re waiting to be slaughtered, so that pictures can be made. Many years ago we learned the language of our masters. Though we couldn’t help wondering why so few of you bothered to learn ours. Three scenes featuring horses, remembering Jacinto. The first is a daytime forest haunting that winds up at a carousel, the second a rainy street in Portugal, the finale a nighttime vigil of fire and water.

Skinship

Over a sea of bodies, ruminations float by on markets, class and precarity. The problem of work. How do we survive our own death?

Hoolboom

"Hoolboom" is a film that Arts Toronto commissioned local filmmaker Wrik Mead to make based on his impressions of fellow filmmaker Mike Hoolboom. With some collaboration from Mike, Wrik has produced a film about the body, self-awareness, and the art of film.

Waves

“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 overturning and resistance, swapping old he-roes for ecosystems and collectives.” Mike Hoolboom

Faultlines

“In a tapestry of migratory luck, artifacts and shells, a mixed choir of images and sounds engages the paradox of a journey that loses all meaning once it reaches its end. The film’s westward inclination to the American shores of the Pacific, bound in a pitiless growth and decay, drives a dense montage, woven with guns and prayers.” - Gary Popovich

Rain

The epilogue of the 9-part feature Imitations of Life (2003).

Spectator

Is it the oldest dream? Giving birth to my father. Shot on a single starry afternoon.

Skinned

A terrible virus finally brings down the internet, and humans look out from the wreckage in the aftermath. Five weigh in with personal recollections: pensive, disbelieving, grieving, philosophical. We used to have movie stars and famous musicians. Now we had each other.

Body Electric

A rework of the new iPhone 15 commercial featuring a singing wall socket. In place of the machine loneliness of the original, a different song from the early Vito Acconci playbook. A direct address to the viewer/listener from a virtual assistant. The new ambient intelligence promises security, rapid response, predictive analysis, microgeneration, efficiency. Here it delivers funwashing messages from the cloud for users in a performative essay on domotics. Talk back from the data harvest and Orwell’s “never sleeping ear.” To challenge them is to “fight the future.”

White Harlem

The March of Time produced 200 newsreels from 1935-1951, shown in movie theatres once per month. In an 18-minute film from August 1939 film called Metropolis, cameramen travelled across New York City, gathering scenes of its 7.5 million people. This short stitches together scenes shot in Harlem, along with outtakes from that shoot, preserved at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington. This footage has been “restored” using AI, image resolution is HD, frame rate 60 fps, colour and grain added. The voice-over offers reflections on the way these images were framed through an apartheid lens, a reflection of the white men who ran and staffed the company. W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin and Christina Sharpe offered second thoughts. How many movies are made without any pictures in them? [Overview courtesy of Mike Hoolboom]

Rain

One hundred children were dying every day in Gaza when I made this hopeless poem of hope. How to step into a new kind of Jerusalem without becoming what we feared? How to leave behind every notion of the chosen few, and embrace the ones along the way, finding a promised land in each other. Based on an excerpt from the poem "Red Sea: April 2002" by Aurora Levins Morales, a disabled Puerto Rican Jewish writer and activist.

The Celluloid Closet

Exuberant, eye-opening movie that serves up a dazzling hundred-year history of the role of gay men and lesbians have had on the silver screen. Film contains fabulous footage from 120 films showing the changing face of cinema sexuality, from cruel stereotypes to covert love to the activist triumphs of the 1990s.

The Times of Harvey Milk

Harvey Milk was an outspoken human rights activist and one of the first openly gay U.S. politicians elected to public office; even after his assassination in 1978, he continues to inspire disenfranchised people around the world.