"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)

Panic Bodies

This film explores a now-obscure American expansionist, William Walker, who through military force and coercion became president of Nicaragua in 1856. Walker was one of many expansionists who believed it was America's Manifest Destiny to conquer all of the Americas and who engaged in border raids in Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America. Filmmaker Kathryn Ramey blends found footage, documentary photography, ethnographic inquiry, and personal travelogue with experimental film techniques such as hand-processing, optical printing, and time-lapse to detour and derail the various approaches to historymaking that have been applied to this story.