Movies: Mike Hoolboom

Mike Hoolboom reflects in 27 brief scenes on the life of his father, who died in June 2017. Using home movies, snapshots and found footage, he creates a portrait of a exceedingly clever, yet evanescent father figure haunted by the war that sent his o...

One of my father's favourite expressions, mostly passed away now: for the birds. Meaning: that was nothing. In this aviary anthology, the narrator describes a post-art life that leads, inexorably, to the nature of nature....

Part 2 of 7-part bio-feature Public Lighting (2004)....

A lesbian call fall in and out of love while Prime Minister Wayne Gretzky wages a war against secessional Quebec for media money....

A meditation on birth, silence and the American cinema, sealed with a kiss. A single gesture into light....

'Amy, is narrated by a model (Liisa Repo-Martell) who’s painfully uncomfortable with her own body and “old woman’s” face. Astonishing closing image is a tightly composed telephoto shot on the start of a marathon race among young schoolgirls, dashing ...

In the near future, Canada is at war with Quebec, battles are determined by television ratings, and weapons are sponsored by McDonald's and IBM. In the midst of social chaos, a lesbian couple, Barb and Alex, dress themselves in protective masks, gown...

An ice cream factory worker reflects on AIDS and the new capitalism. "A move from a regime of cultural production ordered by authorship, originality and signature to one ordered by the brand, branding and simulation." This short essay doc is indebted...

Part 7 of 9-part feature Imitations of Life (2003)....

“Shot in an abandoned warehouse, documenting a contemporary adaptation of the Oedipus story by a group of Toronto experimental filmmakers, Antigone is both a documentary about searching for meaning and validity in the old story, and a fiction about t...

A gay man reminisces about his deceased lover, a victim of AIDS....

A tribute to the godmother of German experimental cinema Birgit Hein....

Begun in a three-week seminar at the Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD) in October 2016, seventeen of us began an excavation together, immersing ourselves in a selection of Red Cross shorts made over nearly a century in countries round the wo...

Part 8 of 9-part feature Imitations of Life (2003)....

Part of 1 of 7-part bio-collection feature Public Lighting (2004)....

A terrible virus finally brings down the internet, and humans look out from the wreckage in the aftermath. Five weigh in with personal recollections: pensive, disbelieving, grieving, philosophical. We used to have movie stars and famous musicians. N...

This moving film tells the story of Hoolboom's close friend and collaborator Mark Karbusicky, who unexpectedly committed suicide in 2007. Interviews with Mark's friends and family, as well as his lover, are interwoven with home movies, offering a gli...

For more than two decades Mike Hoolboom has been one of our foremost artistic witnesses of the plague of the twentieth century, HIV. A personal voice documenting and piercing the clichéd spectrum of Living With AIDS from carnal abjection to incandesc...

The movie is animated by a question. Can we see what we see? I think of what is close at hand, the painting on the wall, book titles shouting from the choir on the shelf. And then further afield, to countries that have been made visible or invisible ...

The cross-country travelogue which is the basis of this film was made in the fourties. Sponsored by the Canadian government, it is pitched towards an American understanding, unfolding the blank geography of its northern neighbour as a playground for ...