Judy Versus Capitalism

Mike Hoolboom's cinema may be rooted in the medium's experimental vein, with its kaleidoscopes of manipulated visual archives, its bursts of light and its plunges into the poetry of superimposed image collages. Still, the fact remains that it is far from being a superficial and garishly aesthetic cinema, turned in on its own artifice. No, behind the abstraction of all this filmic virtuosity, there is a weight, a density to Mike Hoolboom's cinema. His works have something to say. Most often about the marginalized, the disenfranchised, the large sections of society neglected by the worst excesses of capitalism and neoliberalism. In his friend Judy Rebick, he finds an ally, a kindred spirit in these merciless struggles for the most basic human rights, especially women's rights. By applying the Hoolboom approach to this remarkable woman's public and intimate history, he constructs a kind of vivid, feverish poem that draws us into the heart of this incredible life filled with dazzling paradoxes. Indeed, how did such a committed, strong-willed, go-getter, so fearless as to be unassailable, manage to hide from the world - starting with herself - wounds deep and devastating enough to literally cause the cracking of her personality? Buoyed by Judy's voice, which comments on both her activism and her mental health problems with a staggering clarity that's not devoid of humour, anyone watching this whirlwind of images that straddle the line between experiment and documentary can't help but feel admiration and fascination both for this woman with an exceptional destiny and for the prodigious filmmaker who tells her story.

Claire Valade
Critic and programmer