Café Ex
2024 - 2025 Season
This ongoing visiting artist series presents artist-curated evenings of independent experimental film and video in an intimate atmosphere. The series features Canadian experimental cinema, with guest filmmakers presenting their work and engaging in extensive discussions with audience members for a "pick-your-price" admission.
Pixie Cram
December 10, 2024
Mike Hoolboom
April 17, 2025
Mike Hoolboom: Life Beyond the Frame
Thursday, April 17, 2025
7:00 pm
Club SAW
Screening, book launch, readings!
As the final show of its 26th season of celebrating Canada’s experimental moving image artists, Café Ex is proud to showcase the recent work of internationally acclaimed, Governor General’s Award for Media and Visual Arts winner, Mike Hoolboom. Hoolboom’s astonishingly prolific career as a filmmaker, visual artist, writer, and critic has for decades made him one of Canada’s most important and consistently daring artists.
This special evening will feature a personal video message from Hoolboom, screenings of four recent works, and the launch of a new Canadian Film Institute co-publication on Hoolboom’s work, Mike Hoolboom: Work (Canadian Film Institute, ConverSalon Collective; Ottawa-Toronto 2025), edited by Clint Enns. A former Café Ex guest artist, Enns will attend the screening to discuss the book and host a series of readings by contributors to this remarkable look at Hoolboom’s extraordinary output to date.
Tickets are available as ‘pick-your-price’ or $20 for ticket and book.
Program
Video Introduction by Mike Hoolboom
Disco
15 minutes, 2023
Based on kpunk’s seminal UK blog, Disco looks at how the 60s actually occupied England in the 70s. Liberation movements flourished, along with a new queer dance form that offered new social spaces for an intersectional underclass. The reaction shot to these new incursions into democracy was a corporate coup d’etat that would come to be known as neoliberalism. Its first laboratory was in Chile, where American economists provided intellectual cover for national looting.
-Mike Hoolboom
Amy
16 minutes, 2004
“Finale [to the seven-part Public Lighting], 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 ultra-slo-mo, and accompanied by a girls’ chorus hauntingly singing Brian Wilson’s ‘God Only Knows.’ Widely eclectic lensing and looks in various media and in color and black-and-white flow nicely from one section to the next, aided by gifted editor Mark Karbusicky.”
-Robert Koehler, Variety
Nazareth
7 minutes, 2021
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?
-Mike Hoolboom
Letter from Fred
10 minutes, 2023
A letter from my friend Alfred Vander. Though when we met he was Fred Pelon, anarchist super 8 filmmaker, a prolific machine of thoughts and pictures, growing fungi on film, and on the archaic behaviours of the state. But it turned out that film was only the next stage in a life dedicated to reinvention. In this brief post, he describes his new normal, no longer living in a boat but a monastery, working as a caregiver, a gardener, a bridge keeper. As the pandemic waxes on, and my relationships to fringe movie practices and places that used to be central feel increasingly abstract, as if part of some faraway dream, these spare lines offer new hope, and the ongoing consolation of friendship.
-Mike Hoolboom
Pixie Cram
Tuesday, December 10 ∙ 7:00 PM ∙ Club SAW
Pixie Cram is an Ottawa-based film director, writer and media artist. A longstanding and key figure in Ottawa's active independent media arts community, Cram's inventive, searching works explore themes of identity, gender politics, history, women's rights, nature, and technology. Working in documentary, short drama, experimental, and animation modes, Cram's versatile and engaging work offers passionate, poetic explorations of everything from motherhood to childhood to Joan of Arc to the Cold War to midwifery. We are proud to present this remarkable collection of films, representing two decades of Pixie Cram's remarkably diverse, ever-evolving catalogue of cinematic expression.
Her films have screened at festivals and galleries across Canada and internationally, including Interfilm Berlin, Filmfest Dresden, Animafest Cyprus, and the Ottawa International Animation Festival. In addition to her own work, she works as a freelance videographer and editor.
The Canadian Film Institute is honoured to have Pixie Cram as the guest artist to open our 26th season of Café Ex.
Pixie Cram will attend the screening to introduce and discuss her films.
Program
Xerces Blue (2003)
The Factory of Light (2007)
Joan (2014)
Emergency Broadcast (2017)
Pragmatopia (2020)
Witch Woman (2022)
Passage (2023)