Soul-Baring Doc on Judy Rebick Kicks Off Virtual Rendezvous with Madness Festival

By Liam Lacey

Feminist activist Judy Rebick is well-known for her righteous anger, but not her “madness” per se. 

That makes an intriguing subject in Judy Versus Capitalism, the opening film of the 28th Rendezvous with Madness festival (Oct. 15-25), which includes 14 features and 48 shorts along with an accompanying art exhibition on the theme of mental health.

Rebick, now 75, is best-known for her activism for abortion rights alongside Henry Morgentaler in the ‘80s (in 1983, she famously blocked a man attempting to attack the doctor with garden shears) and for her time in the ‘90s as head of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women. 

But her articulate and assertive public self, at rallies and on television, was often at odds with her damaged private world - as she revealed in her  2018 book, Heroes In My Head, about her battles with depression, “dissociative identity disorder” (formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder) and recovered memories of sexual abuse.

The film, by experimental filmmaker Michael Hoolboom, follows Rebick’s chronological account of her life experiences in the voice-over narration. 

Visually, it presents a flurry of possibly associated images: Kids in masks, headlights at night, blurry body parts, a woman spinning, scudding clouds, black-and-white and photo-negative images. It’s all apparently intended to evoke the subjective experience of fractured memory. 

Judy Versus Capitalism is available online - along with a discussion with Rebick and the filmmaker - for 48 hours following its Thursday night virtual and in-person screening.

The focus on a political activist such as Rebick is an indication of how much the discourse around mental health is about politics – poverty, incarceration, gender and power.  But in a couple of feature films in the program, the subject isn’t really mental health at all.  

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That’s the case with Nasir  (D. Arun Karthick), a day-in-the-life character study of a Muslim sari salesman in the city of Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India, a member of a threatened minority with the rise of militant Hindu nationalism.  

Similarly, Veins of the World, is really about the environmental threat of resource extraction. The first fictional film from Mongolian director, Byambasuren Davaa, whose docudrama, The Story of the Weeping Camel earned an Academy Award nomination in 2005. Her film  follows 11-year-old Amra, a child of yurt-dwelling herders, who is obsessed with the Mongolia’s Got Talent competition.

His father is an activist against gold-mining companies. And when he dies in an accident, Amra is left to carry on his father’s  legacy. Though neither film logically belongs in a festival about mental health, they are beautifully-crafted films and well-worth watching.

The connection between justice and mental health is much clearer in Hiroshi Sunairi’s 48 Years – Silent Dictator, which largely consists of an extended interview with Iwao Hakamada, a former boxer who was charged with murdering a family, and spent 48 years on Death Row, a record according to Guinness World Records. 

Hakamada was released in 2014, after 48 years, when it was discovered he had been wrongly accused. During his long incarceration, Hakamada suffered a psychotic breakdown. The delusive world he lives in – of a powerful world state, a machine God, and his own heroic role in opposition to the evil system – is the stuff of dystopian science fiction.  

 The festival closes with the Iranian film, The Unseen, an hour-long animated documentary about homeless women in Tehran, which returns to the themes of authoritarianism and patriarchal authority. It uses cardboard dolls and recorded audio to convey the stories of five homeless women inmates of an over-crowded detention shelter.  

Filmmaker and animator Behzad Nalbandi, who spent five years on the project, follows their devastating stories of sexual violence, mental illness and drug abuse. Since Nalbandi first began recording, two of the original women have died and the other three remain in detention. The choice of cardboard as the material for the dolls was deliberate: Homeless people, sleeping under broken boxes on the streets of Tehran, are known as “cardboard people.”

 For complete listings, including features, short films, post-screening panels and Q&As and box office, visit www.workmanarts.com. As part of the festival, there’s a visual arts exhibit, RE:BUILDING RESILIENCE, at Workman Arts at 651 Dufferin Street, which includes 25 installations dealing with mental health issues. All live and virtual events must be booked in advance and are pay-what-you-wish.