Named after a poem by CAConrad, I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead explores poetry and disobedience. Gibson made the first recordings on the eve of the 45th presidential inauguration in January 2017, as a portrait of two of the United States’ most important living poets, CAConrad and Eileen Myles. For the rest of that year, she continued filming in America and Western Europe, focusing on the mass refugee migration across the Mediterranean Sea, the Grenfell Tower fire in London, and the repercussions of political unrest and war. The words of CAConrad and Myles are interwoven with those of Audre Lorde, Alice Notely and Adrienne Rich, and with sensitive portraits of her own life and family. The film’s score, by world-renowned experimental musician and composer Pauline Oliveros, lends the film a remarkable sense of intimacy. Clearly in search of a ritual power, whereby the poet becomes the prophet who points to an alternative path in times of authoritarian danger, Gibson’s film beats a path of empathy through the forest of chaos.

Part of NORMAL SCHNORMAL, a multidisciplinary programme on normality and other deviations.