Mike Hoolboom’s moving portrait of his longtime friend, legendary social activist and author Judy Rebick, artfully fuses different cinematic and narrative strategies, combining political history and confessional, the atmospheric and the ruminative. Judy versus Capitalism recounts Rebick’s extraordinary impact on Canada’s politics, including her work helping to build the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, her writing and broadcasting, and her ceaseless advocacy on a wide range of crucial issues. Indeed, at times Rebick emerges as a kind of leftist Pynchonian character who’s eerily present at the most pivotal moments — from her involvement with the Waffle caucus to when she prevented an assailant from stabbing Henry Morgentaler as he opened his abortion clinic in Toronto. Hoolboom seamlessly links this history to Rebick’s own struggles with physical and mental health, most notably dissociative identity disorder, a condition she has been extraordinarily courageous about discussing. Few films have shown how the personal and political are intertwined so effectively, and fewer still have managed to be poignant, harrowing, and yet affirmative.
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