We are honoured to welcome acclaimed filmmaker, writer, and recipient of one of the 2017 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, Mike Hoolboom as our special in-person guest. Hoolboom presents two programs, Capitalisms 1: Unlearning Lessons and Capitalisms 2: The Family You Choose. Through fragments of history, memory, and resistance, Hoolboom assembles a cinema of relation asking how images might still carry care, grief, and solidarity within economies of spectacle and forgetting.
Capitalisms is an ongoing project begun in 2016. 12 features, 55 shorts. Here is the first of a two-program selection offering views from Nazareth, Victory Day in Russia, a mental health centre in Ohio. Essay miniatures. Hope ventriloquisms. – Mike Hoolboom
This program is rated 18A.
Incoming (Opening Loop)
Dir. Mike Hoolboom
2024, Canada, 3 min
A collection of 64 photographs, in black-and-white and colour, offer a suite of candid portraits showing faces old and young, all looking up into an unknown moment of the present. Not a single-channel film, but an installation loop.
“Perhaps in their glimmer and weight you saw a reflection of all that you wanted, and all that you feared.” Justin Torres
Wax Museum
Dir. Mike Hoolboom and Alena Koroleva
2020, Canada, 12 min
In a suite of 15 scenes, most arriving in a single master shot, the Russian heroine renegotiates her pact with Russian capitalism, and the new bodies and relationships it made possible. Shot in Saint Petersberg during a sunny autumn, when our faces could still bear the old light.
Nazareth
2021-2025, Canada, 7 min
A return to the fateful year of 1948 in Israel, reframed by a single photograph that is taken up one face at a time. Four figures on a hillside bear witness to the revolutionary society, the new state, the new law. Like too many moments of catastrophe it is filled with invisibility charms and ghost relations. How to speak of what can’t be put into words, how to show what cannot be seen?
*10-minute break*
Breathing Lessons
2024, Canada, 5 min
Thirteen slowly dissolving photographs offer a serial pattern of raised arms and hands. Birth, celebration, worship, work, surrender, resistance.
Sediments
2024, Canada, 9 min
There are five movements, each one describes a night walk, narrating the story of a son and his father. An activist father brings home the cost of saying no. The son is the one who is left to represent (in broken spectral images, in glitched and fractured sounds) what is no longer there, the home that wasn’t home, the streets that never belonged to him, even if they remain the architecture of his real self. His neighbourhood and culture.
Scrapbook
2015, Canada, 19 min
Lensed in Ohio’s Broadview Developmental Center in 1967 by secret camera genius and audio visual healer Jeffrey Paull, Scrapbook tells the story of audacious autistic Donna Washington in her own words, as she encounters pictures of one of her former selves fifty years later.
*10-minute break*
After Victory Day
2020, Canada, 8 min
The movie’s prelude visits Lenin’s home town of Ulyanovsk during Victory Day, the annual commemoration of WW2’s end, in an increasingly militarized spectacle of children and guns and then moves to anti-capitalist gestures in Strasbourg (France) where DIY collectives create new forms of contact and resistance. With help from Simone de Beauvoir, Oscar Wilde and Celine Callot.
Rain
Dir. Mike Hoolboom
2024, Canada, 5 min
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?
White Harlem
Dir. Mike Hoolboom
2024, Canada, 9 min
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.
The word that kills death
Dir. Mike Hoolboom
2024, Canada, 7 min
A reflection on maternity and violence using 43 black-and-white photographs.
