70 minutes of strangers in their own skin, mourning through a broken lens.
"Panic Bodies is a 70-minute, six-part exploration of the ways we experience the body's betrayals: disease, decline and death. The film is a panorama of emotionally charged recollections of strange relatives and estranged siblings, staged recreations of fast-fading pasts and personal mythologies, and reflections on the anxious states created by the body's fragile claims on time and space. It's about being a stranger in your own skin. Panic Bodies perfects the phantom quality of any good work about mourning, but it is not reducible to that. It is also enlivened by the intimacy that comes from having made a spectacle of personal secrets." (Kathleen Pirrie Adams, Xtra)
Editing
Six-part structure weaves recollections into haunted mosaic.
Direction
Hoolboom stages personal mythologies as fragile spectacle.
Director
Mike Hoolboom
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Made at the height of Canada's experimental film scene, it's part of a wave of queer Canadian filmmakers turning autobiography into political form.
Janieta Eyre, one of the cast, was primarily known as a photographer who staged herself as her own identical twin—her presence adds layers of doubling and constructed identity.
US
CA
