The Cinematheque

In Person: Holly Márie Parnell

Working in film and expanded cinema, the Irish/​Canadian artist Holly Márie Parnell is drawn to the way power embeds and affects people and places. Taking a documentary approach, her work is built from personal encounters and is motivated by the subtle yet powerful truths of embodied knowledge and lived experience. Through her practice she explores ideas around connectedness and freedom by looking at the ways in which primal needs are being threatened and eroded within our current economic and institutional frameworks.

This program will be preceded by an introduction from curator Susan Gibb and followed by a conversation with Holly Márie Parnell led by the artist Christine D’Onofrio.

Cabbage
Canada/​Ireland/​United Kingdom 2023
Holly Márie Parnell
22 min. Digital

An intimate work made in collaboration with the filmmaker’s family, Cabbage re-frames language and explores personal agency within an ableist paradigm. It centralizes her brother’s digital and rhythmic writings using eye tracking technology, and her mother’s reflections on a life lived having to prove her son’s humanity. Moving between contrasts of lived experience and bureaucratic violence, the film is a subtle examination of how a human life is measured and valued. The film documents the months preceding a move from Canada back home to Ireland—a country the family had to leave a decade prior because of austerity-driven cuts to disability funding.

hole in the stone
Scotland/​Ireland 2025
Holly Márie Parnell
22 min. Digital

A preview of a new work in development that offers a meditation on our relationship to the future through the lens of farming in rural Ireland.