Mills Folly Microcinema welcomes Chicago-based filmmaker, curator, and activist M. Woods for a screening of Body Prop, part of The Death Spiral Tour 2025 on Wednesday, April 23, 2025 at 7:00pm. Admission $5.00, free for ALL members. Doors open at 6:30pm.
M. Woods (They/Them/He/Him) has been screening work internationally since 2007 while a student at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where they studied under filmmakers Lynne Sachs and Marco Williams. Originally mentored by Design Convergence Lab co-founder Mindy Faber, M is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and activist based in Chicago and the principal creative at Dissassociative Productions.
Body Prop | M. Woods | USA | 2020-present | 75 minutes
Mostly made of hand-processed super 8 and 16mm film, Body Prop is a polemic against white supremacy, the dissolution of the Body Politic, and the desecration of the physical body by racist institutions. Influenced heavily by the work of Guy Debord, Marlon Riggs, Saul Levine, and Stan Brakhage, the movie is divided into five movements and first premiered as a short film at the prestigious Oberhausen International Short Film Festival in 2020.
With support from the Foundation for Contemporary Art and Lightcone, Disassociative Productions presents The Death Spiral Tour 2025 featuring M Woods’ three critically-acclaimed feature films, Dailies From Dumpland, Body Prop, and Commodity Trading. Other venues on the tour include Millennium Film Workshop and Filmmakers' Co-op in New York City; AgX Boston, and Rhizome in Washington D.C. This independently-produced tour is dedicated to the spirit of David Lynch and other radical auteurs who created their own methods of distribution. More information at www.thedigitalsickness.com.
The Death Spiral Tour 2024 is part of Woods’ continued resistance against the current administration, featuring radical films and post-screening discussions intended to activate an organized avant-garde against the regime.
Book Releases
M. Woods will also be presenting two new self-published works of analog photography and poetry at every tour stop, capping off the tour with an official book launch at the vital hub for independent publishing, Counterpath Press, in Denver, Colorado.
[Temporary] Custody
By Annmarie & M. Woods, 64 page full-color
In this heartbreaking collection of photography and poetry, M. Woods and their daughter, Annmarie, playfully explore the medium of polaroid photography. Their camera exposes the bittersweet ephemerality of “endless youth” and the persistence of trauma, capturing elusive and fleeting moments together. This temporal despair is punctuated by the buoyancy of childhood and the resonant pain of divorce.
The Abridged Oxoniae Photographae
By M. Woods, 64 page full-color.
In this abridged collection of experimental medium-format photography and poetry, The University of Oxford is rendered as an enigma, a never-ending puzzle of rusticated concrete and cobblestone, repeatedly re-resurrected as itself, in attempts to transcend its own physical presence and ascend to Holy Pleroma as a mythological ideal of a never-ending past whiteness. All of Academia and all pursuits of the unknown lead to despair, the rabbit holes of our curiosity, and the never-ending spiral of our own lack. The Oxoniae Photographae is an Imperial scab under which the intrinsic properties of violence hide within formal aesthetic boundaries, disguised as exoskeletal beauty while functioning as atrocity.
ABOUT MILLS FOLLY MICROCINEMA
Mills Folly Microcinema showcases nationally recognized experimental film and video art from the festival and microcinema circuit. We network with regional filmmakers and organizations to bring filmmakers and guest programmers to Madison for screenings. And we incubate local experimental filmmaking by providing screen time at Project Projection events.
