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Mike Hoolboom

Mike Hoolboom

Michael "Mike" Hoolboom is a Canadian independent, experimental filmmaker. Having begun filmmaking at an early age, Hoolboom released his first major work, a "film that's not quite a film" entitled White Museum, in 1986. Although he continued to produce films, his rate of production improved drastically after he was diagnosed with HIV in 1988 or 1989; this gave a "new urgency" to his works. Since then he has made dozens of films, two of which have won Best Short Film at the Toronto International Film Festival. His films have also featured in more than 200 film festivals worldwide.

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Movies Made By Mike Hoolboom (112)

Rain (2024)

One hundred children were dying every day in Gaza when I made this hopeless poem of hope. How to step into a new kind of Jerusalem without becoming what we feared? How to leave behind every notion of the chosen few, and embrace the ones along the way, find ...

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Body Electric (2024)

A rework of the new iPhone 15 commercial featuring a singing wall socket. In place of the machine loneliness of the original, a different song from the early Vito Acconci playbook. A direct address to the viewer/listener from a virtual assistant. The new a ...

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Nazareth (2023)

A return to the fateful year of 1948 in Israel, reframed by a single photograph that is taken up one face at a time. Four figures on a hillside bear witness to the revolutionary society, the new state, the new law. Like too many moments of catastrophe it i ...

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Birgit Hein (2023)

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

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Close-Up (2022)

Tasked to produce a short intro to my feature-length essay Cut, I turned to the origins of the close-up, in a scene featuring camera person Billy Bitzer and director D.W. Griffiths. How to live in this new body, with its cuts, its fissures and fractures? ...

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The Central Gesture (2022)

Based on a text by Lisa Robertson (from her bracing book Nilling), a meditation on how cities are bound not by geography but laws and rules designed to exclude. Who is fully human and who works for minimum wage, or no wage at all? Between the titles, home- ...

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How to Watch Pornography (2022)

A movie essay using theory fragments from porn studies pioneer Linda Williams, radical gender theorist Paul Preciado, feminist theorists Hortense Spillers, Karen Barad and more. A variety of hazy, lo fi clips rub up against an isolated digerati immersed in ...

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New York State of Mind (2022)

In his essay on fossil capitalism and the high price of cheap energy, Mike Hoolboom revives New York from the beginning of the last century. The restored footage of busy urban traffic is accompanied by his divergent reflection on cities built primarily for ...

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Waves (2022)

"After the death of my mother, I began a suite of women superstar portraits. They were scientists, poets and activists, a second family busy inventing new forms of relationship, even of social organisation. From alternative rockers to radical ecologists, t ...

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Skinship (2022)

Over a sea of bodies, ruminations float by on markets, class and precarity. The problem of work. How do we survive our own death? ...

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Letter to Fred (2022)

A letter from my friend Alfred Vander. Though when we met he was Fred Pelon, anarchist super 8 filmmaker, a prolific machine of thoughts and pictures, growing fungi on film, and on the archaic behaviours of the state. But it turned out that film was only t ...

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Freedom from Everything (2022)

Personal film essay about two pandemics: AIDS and Coronavirus. Body memorials, survivor stories, remembrances. Both plagues are reframed by neoliberalism and its central mythology of personal freedom, brilliantly laid out in Hito Steyerl's essay gem "Freed ...

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Postcards (2021)

How to use this old technology of the postcard, with its marriage of image and text, its insistence that every exchange has two-sides which can never be considered at the same time, to write oneself back into the world? The traveller alights in Colombia, B ...

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Model Citizens (2021)

The amazement of people as recorded in early films is the central motif of the film appropriated from the Lumiere brothers' collections which was shot around 1900 in London, restored, and coloured by artificial intelligence. It also offers a reflection on ...

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Listening (2021)

Vancouver composer and sound ecologist Hildegard Westerkamp was the only woman to participate in the original version of the World Soundscape project that not only brought new ears to city life, but laid the foundation for noise bylaws/pollution standards, ...

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The Guy on the Bed (2021)

News from another pandemic, the one that "changed everything" before it fell out of the news cycle and collective memory, except for the newly infected or those who, like myself, managed a new life after death. Based on a text by David Wojnarowicz. ...

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Ice Cream (2021)

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 to de ...

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Feeling States (2021)

Short by Mike Hoolboom. ...

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Haifa (2021)

Simon Weil wrote that attention is the rarest kind of generosity. How to extend this generosity to a single photograph, made in 1949 in the port city of Haifa, in the new state of Israel? There are three soldiers from the Haganah watching over a Palestinia ...

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Sundays (2021)

An afternoon idyll. How to listen to the language of the lakeshore plants, as they ripple in the mid-afternoon light? The story they have to tell – of collaboration, cooperation, contamination – leaks into their merely human observers. Everyone is a bo ...

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We Are Islands (2020)

Based on texts gleaned from Catherine Bush's novel Blaze Island, this multi-layered collage offers a fleeting love story on a distant shore. The novel reimagines Shakespeare's last testament, The Tempest, now set on a fictionalized version of Fogo Island, ...

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Feast (2020)

When he won his Giller Award, Saint Lucia poet/playwright Derek Walcott couldn't make it, so Michael Ondaatje stood in his place and read Love After Love, the most beautiful poem I had ever heard. It remains a haunting and a promise. I learned it "by heart ...

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Zen Basketball (2020)

In a series of simple frames, the often misunderstood practice of Zen takes shape as basketball bliss. Now in retirement, the greatest defensive player of the amateur leagues continues to practice on a remote island, far from the madding crowds. His techni ...

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After Victory Day (2020)

The movie's prelude visits Lenin's home town of Ulyanovsk during Victory Day, the annual commemoration of WW2's end, in an increasingly militarized spectacle of children and guns and then moves to anti-capitalist gestures in Strasbourg (France) where DIY c ...

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Judy Versus Capitalism (2020)

A bio-doc about my pal Judy Rebick: iconic second wave Canadian feminist, radical activist, journalist and writer. She is the founding publisher of rabble.ca, Canada's irreverent progressive online news source, and a former president of the National Action ...

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Language, not territory (2019)

In a number of interlocking episodes, five women weigh in on growing up in capitalism. Poetries of survival are interwoven with an adaptation of Mary Oliver's iconic poem Wild Geese. ...

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Gramsci’s Notebooks (2019)

After a ruinous engagement, the unnamed narrator alights for Palermo in order to take up with his dead Italian friend, Antonio Gramsci. He was the primal scene of Italy's Communist party, and for his tireless reporting and befriending the working class he ...

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(S)he Said that (2019)

An illustrated lecture, with digressive overlays. Remixology meets biopower. ...

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After Drowning (2019)

In this dramatic short, a refugee crosses the ocean to escape the ravages of war, but loses family along the way. The musings of poets (Brand, Carson, Vuong) become his conscience and reflection. Shot with a lyric intensity, as if everything was being seen ...

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I Touched Her Legs remix (2019)

Eva Marie Rodbro's embedded ethnographic maestro short, originally shot in Brownwood, Texas in 2009, is given a fan remake. Night vision animal life and teen hangouts conjure a temporary and fragile collective, while conversation fragments, alternately per ...

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Father Auditions (2019)

"Compilation" of five previous works of the director - Leaving Church, Damaged, 27 Thoughts About My Dad, Rain, Buffalo Death Mask - Father Auditions is a prism that reflects different images and at the same time, in the assembly of the distinguished short ...

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27 Thoughts About My Father (2019)

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 own fat ...

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Threshold (2019)

A detourned love poem by Ocean Vuong remixed for Palestine. The root of it all is a calling, a voice, which is followed through Gaza markets and tunnels until the cause of liberation can be seen clearly and embraced. Why do birds suddenly appear? ...

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Lover Man (2019)

The heart of the matter is friend and mentor Mike Cartmell in an outtake from Alan Zweig's Vinyl (2000). Mike insists that listening deeply to music, the music of Coleman Hawkins for example, is an authentic relationship, equal to human company. The movie ...

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Soft Animal Body (2019)

This ten-minute video lecture was commissioned by Haema Svanesan and Marina DeMaio who are putting together a Buddhism and Art confab called In the Present Moment: Buddhism, Contemporary Art, and Social Practice at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria in Oc ...

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Credit Card (2019)

In a suite of interviews for his "second first feature" Godard submitted to the slings and arrows of North American media interrogators with polite hostility and a bristling intelligence. Here, the briefest chitchat is rendered in eight parts, which sees t ...

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Be Your Dog (2019)

A meditation in two parts. The traveller lays up a set of headphones and tranforms his tropical setting into a concert stage, listening to an acoustic cover of the Stooges' hit which gives this movie its title, the one ranked 438 on Rolling Stone magazine' ...

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Supernatural Power (2018)

Set in a Red Cross rehab centre in Vietnam, victims of the American war learn to walk on new prosthetic legs. The mystical faiths of destruction and providing assistance. Made during a Geneva workshop, using the archives of the Red Cross. ...

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The Bed and the Street (2018)

A love story set in the global anti-austerity demonstrations. As citizens take back their streets, two women meet and fall in love. What geometry of desire will help overthrow the state? What micro-politics of sharing and communality will provide fuel for ...

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Lions (2018)

This miniature presents an extensive reflection on ways of watching, reception and rebellion against indoctrination and control. Making decisions about life choices serves as a parallel to ways of watching, interpretation and experience which may even lead ...

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After the American Election (2018)

Based on dreams (waking and non-waking) by pals and acquaintances of noted American writer Lucy Corin, the night after the epochal US election of 2016. A bevy of speakers weigh in on the new world. ...

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I Saw Him There (2018)

Queering the haj. A man recollects a moment (was it any longer than that?) in the aptly named city of Mecca. A conversation ensues in the crowd. The touch of language. Framing shots by luminous shooter Taravat Khalili. Commissioned by LIFT for the Jacques ...

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A Boy’s Life (2018)

Originally cast as the second part of a six-part feature Panic Bodies (1998), the original 16mm negatives were rescued courtesy of the Cinematheque Quebecoise, then rescanned, recut, and reimagined. They were shot in 1996, the year the AIDS cocktail arrive ...

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3 Dreams of Horses (2017)

Film is made out of gelatin that comes from horses. They're waiting to be slaughtered, so that pictures can be made. Many years ago we learned the language of our masters. Though we couldn't help wondering why so few of you bothered to learn ours. Three sc ...

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Ghost (2017)

How to say good-bye to friends? How to keep from becoming a ghost in the old streets of the Czech Republic, at once too strange and familiar? Let's step inside the old scenes of love (which are also the prelude to love's betrayal) before animal rescue can ...

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Nursing History (2017)

In a Red Cross hospital in Vietnam, the young white nurse tends his wounds. Drawn from the archives of the Red Cross in Geneva. ...

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Visiting Hours (2017)

How to show the long bus ride began in the dark to visit the husband in jail? The repetition which is new every morning. The feeling of seeing him. The company of others who are like and unlike? Her newly digital speech is broken and slowly restitched. The ...

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Spectator (2017)

Is it the oldest dream? Giving birth to my father. Shot on a single starry afternoon. ...

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From the Archives of the Red Cross (2017)

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 world. T ...

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Colour My World (2017)

Three-part colour inquiry. Questions adapted from Frederick Douglass to Jericho Brown bring the hurt. The images have been soaked in water until everything recognizable has been stripped away, leaving behind a wash of colours, a bacterial flow. ...

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Identification (2017)

Shot in the murk and fog of a breakdown. Friends jam, a body lies on the ground, James Baldwin visits his father for the last time. Inspired by Black Lives Matter. Remembering Charlie 'Africa' Keunang. ...

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In 1974 (2017)

A reflection on colour in fifteen camera tests. ...

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Subway Stops (2017)

Shot in the subway during the summer and fall of 2016, each subject appears for a minute, 69 in all, one for each of Toronto's subway stops. Serial portraits in black and white. ...

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Introduction to Mountains (2016)

Based on Dogen's Mountains and Rivers Sutra, written in 13th century Japan. Here are a few words of introduction spoken by the artist. Direct-to-camera address in an alternating light current, an establishing shot of language. How should we begin? ...

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Incident Reports (2016)

After a purported bike accident, the nameless amnesiac undertakes audio-visual therapy by producing a series of one-minute shots through the streets of Toronto. The result is an episodic love letter set against the city's intimacies and haunts, populated b ...

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We Make Couples (2016)

This Marxist love story asks: could the couple also be a form of resistance? Essay notes on marriage, microcinema, and the art of projection. With guest appearances by Occupy, Pussy Riot protesters, a runaway goat, two poodles, an army of street marchers, ...

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Farrago (2015)

In 1984, Mike Cartmell began Narratives of Egypt, a four-part series that deals with the father in Prologue: Infinite Obscure, the son in In the form of the letter "X", the lover in Cartouche, and wraps it all up in Farrago, a word meaning: a medley, a hea ...

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Scrapbook (2015)

Lensed in Ohio's Broadview Developmental Center in 1967 by secret camera genius and audio visual healer Jeffrey Paull, Scrapbook tells the story of audacious autistic Donna Washington in her own words, as she encounters pictures of one of her former selves ...

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Second Nature (2014)

A primatologist and sex researcher uncover love as a test case, while weighing in on Palestine, power and bonobos. ...

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Safety Film Collection (2014)

A found footage collection of 26 AIDS adverts. Freud uncovered the mysterious connection between language and bodies at the same moment that moving pictures provided new behavior modellings. How do pictures change desire, or the behaviours of desire? This ...

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Safety Picture Collection (2014)

A found footage collection of 26 AIDS adverts. Freud uncovered the mysterious connection between language and bodies at the same moment that moving pictures provided new behavior modellings. How do pictures change desire, or the behaviours of desire? This ...

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Buffalo Death Mask (2013)

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 incandescent s ...

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Lacan Palestine (2012)

Lacan Palestine is a found footage essay about the troubled couple in Palestine. This country without a country has been party to imperial projections for centuries, amply on display here in waves of armed crusaders, legionnaires, Mongols on horseback and ...

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Forest Walk (2011)

Commissioned for LIFT's (Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto) 30th anniversary, this brief black and white sojourn finds a father and son wandering, midway upon the journey of their lives, as the saying goes. Vincent Grenier adds slow motion heat ...

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5 Klesas (2010)

Half-hour digest of Buddhist perception theory. ...

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Mark (2009)

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 glimpse i ...

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Fascination (2006)

"In order to take the next step (not forward or backwards, but only: to go on) it is often necessary to lean on a picture made by someone else, sometimes a word will do, a gesture, the look on a stranger's face. Colin Campbell made the next step possible f ...

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Amy (2004)

'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 toward ...

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Public Lighting (2004)

How do we tell the story of a life? What cruel reduction of an image will stand (in the obituary, the family photo album, the memory of friends) for the years between a grave and a difficult birth? Public Lighting examines the current media obsession with ...

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Tradition (2004)

Part 5 of 7-part bio-feature Public Lighting (2004). ...

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Hiro (2004)

Part 6 of 7-part bio-feature Public Lighting (2004). ...

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Glass (2004)

Part 3 of 7-part bio-feature Public Lighting (2004). ...

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Imitations of Life (2003)

Imitations of life consist of ten chapters, each one of which has an individual intonation and cinematographic style. The chapters: In the Future, Jack, Last Thoughts, Portrait, Secret, In My Car, The Game, Scaling, Imitation of Life, and Rain. ...

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The Invisible Man (2003)

The journey of a someone in search of his roots. He is pursued by his childhood self who has already written his own future, and foretells the amnesia which will doom this traveling. Here is a life made of pictures, an allegory and reflection of life insid ...

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Last Thoughts (2003)

Part 3 of 9-part feature Imitations of Life (2003). ...

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Portrait (2003)

Part 4 of 9-part feature Imitations of Life (2003). ...

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The Game (2003)

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

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Imitation of Life (2003)

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

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Rain (2003)

The epilogue of the 9-part feature Imitations of Life (2003). ...

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Beacon (2002)

BEACON is a montage of location shots filmed at ten different places around the world. These sites are connected by the fact that each is located by the sea. Seamlessly combining travelogue footage and appropriated clips from feature films, BEACON produces ...

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Tom (2002)

Portrait of gay filmmaker and Parkinson's sufferer Tom Chomont. ...

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Writing (2001)

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

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In the City (2000)

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

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Jack (2000)

Part two of the nine-part compilation feature Imitations of Life (2003). ...

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Secret (2000)

Part 5 of 9-part feature Imitations of Life (2003). ...

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Damaged (1999)

A retrospective based on an introspective vision, this stream of still pictures, unfolding to the rhythm of the voice-over (delivered by Steve Reinke), portrays a man who visually exposes his psychological "faults." Recounting eighteen decisive moments in ...

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Hoolboom (1999)

"Hoolboom" is a film that Arts Toronto commissioned local filmmaker Wrik Mead to make based on his impressions of fellow filmmaker Mike Hoolboom. With some collaboration from Mike, Wrik has produced a film about the body, self-awareness, and the art of fil ...

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Hey Madonna (1999)

Scenes from Madonna: Truth or Dare and the music video for Madonna's "Vogue" along with other various videos are spliced together with a letter from a former sexual partner of Madonna's scrolling on the bottom of the screen. Part 4 of 7-part bio-feature Pu ...

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Panic Bodies (1998)

"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 fa ...

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Passing On (1998)

Passing On, a lyrical, typically confessional effort that encapsulates what's preceded it. Hoolboom's dance with death — a motif acknowledged in the medieval woodcut segues between segments — resonates in double-exposed shots of anonymous people simply ...

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Positiv (1998)

A monologue about AIDS, rendered in split-screens generously furbished with images from Terminator 2, science flicks, Michael Jackson and home movies. The opening section of Panic Bodies (70 minutes 1998). ...

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In My Car (1998)

A life lived in cars and a last race with the devil... ...

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In the Future (1998)

Part one of the nine-part feature Imitations of Life (2003). ...

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Eternity (1996)

"Eternity takes the form of a letter about fighting disease and practicing loss, superimposed over haunting images of old teacups, people in boats and water. ...

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Letters From Home (1996)

An overwhelming and luminescent reflection on death, AIDS and living, Letters from Home is a compelling montage of mini-portraits intercut with found footage, home movies, super-8 drama and pixilated imagery. ...

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Dear Madonna (1996)

Jason returns with another letter to Madonna, thanking her for letting him be her "mistress". ...

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Moucle's Island (1995)

"Panic Bodies consists of six parts or chapters, varying in length and style. Each suggests a new approach to these returning questions: what does it mean to have a body; to be a body, and what does this body want? Hoolboom appears in the framing chapters, ...

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House of Pain (1995)

A hybrid of DeSade and Dali, House of Pain is a nightmare that takes place between sleep and death, where the performers appear as mute hallucinations. The film features a hallucinogenic blend of the domestic and perverse. ...

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Frank's Cock (1994)

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

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Justify My Love (1994)

Hoolboom takes the music video for Madonna's "Justify My Love" and runs it alongside a transgressive letter to Madonna from her schoolmate, Jason. ...

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Valentine's Day (1994)

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, gowns and ...

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Escape in Canada (1993)

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

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Escape in Canada (1993)

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 the le ...

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1+1+1 (1993)

Devils fall in love in Seattle in a black comedy of sex, machines and flight. Photographed a frame at a time over three days, 1+1+1 shows us the wordless tale of unlikely lovers, the first appearing as a hovering devil in flight, excreting a vegetable life ...

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Shiteater (1993)

Originally made in 16mm, as the fourth part of the feature-length wordless psychodrama collection House of Pain. Shiteater is a carefully hewn assault on a society bent on consuming itself, an homage to late capitalist ideals of corporate mergers and the d ...

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Mexico (1992)

"In Mexico, experimental filmmakers Hoolboom and Steve Sanguedolce set out to dissect the travel bug. Hoolboom's deadpan, incisive voice-over offers the viewer the air-tight experience of a Third World holiday, while images from an archaeological museum to ...

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Sugar Maple Stand (1990)

Made on a sunny afternoon. A last stand of burning light. Shot in 1985, released in 1990 with a soundtrack by Kaiser Nietzsche (John Kamevaar, Thomas Handy), new soundtrack and title in 2016. ...

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Brand (1989)

BRAND begins like a child's yawn, a fairy tale with an incredible beginning. Brand blends two themes into a fugue of questions and answers. The first theme is a child's play, illuminated here in the flickering shadows of a kindergarten. The second theme sh ...

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Scaling (1988)

A beguiling, humorous presentation of cinematic impermanence. A naked man (Hoolboom), tilted 90 degrees by the camera angle, paints a black shape on a white wall; meanwhile, in a second, superimposed image, he re-paints it in white. ...

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Fat Film (1987)

A memory ritual performed in an enclosed space over twenty-four hours. Featuring dance, costume, lard, and a single performer. The film closes with my brother, just turned eight, holding a swimming diploma – only the light makes the diploma perfectly whi ...

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White Museum (1986)

"The cinematic equivalent of flipping the bird, White Museum is an audacious and often hilarious early effort by master provocateur Mike Hoolboom. Viewers must wait about 30 minutes to see the one and only image in the film. In the meantime, Hoolboom expou ...

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Movies Starring Mike Hoolboom (12)

How to Watch Pornography (2022)

A movie essay using theory fragments from porn studies pioneer Linda Williams, radical gender theorist Paul Preciado, feminist theorists Hortense Spillers, Karen Barad and more. A variety of hazy, lo fi clips rub up against an isolated digerati immersed in ...

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Tales from the Winnipeg Film Group (2017)

The explosive story of how a stubborn band of independent filmmakers started a film co-operative that became the most highly respected and mythologized film centre in Canada. Tales outlines the tremendous importance and impact of Winnipeg on the national f ...

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Land of Not Knowing (2016)

How can we express the emotional experience of depression and suicide and overcome the stigmas associated with mental health? Sanguedolce's experimental documentary brings together four artists (including experimental filmmaker Mike Hoolboom), who speak wi ...

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Buffalo Death Mask (2013)

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 incandescent s ...

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All Fall Down (2009)

An experimental documentary that takes as its starting point a nineteenth century farmhouse in Southern Ontario, Canada, and asks the question "what has been here before? ...

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Vacancy (1999)

Brasília, the "city of hope", "the ultimate utopia of the 20th century" , is being conserved as a cultural heritage today. It is a place as old as the filmmaker. Segments of amateur footage and of feature films shot on location in the early sixties are in ...

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Hoolboom (1999)

"Hoolboom" is a film that Arts Toronto commissioned local filmmaker Wrik Mead to make based on his impressions of fellow filmmaker Mike Hoolboom. With some collaboration from Mike, Wrik has produced a film about the body, self-awareness, and the art of fil ...

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Faultlines (1998)

"In a tapestry of migratory luck, artifacts and shells, a mixed choir of images and sounds engages the paradox of a journey that loses all meaning once it reaches its end. The film's westward inclination to the American shores of the Pacific, bound in a pi ...

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Pensão Globo (1997)

A man faces his approaching death. He takes a journey, his last perhaps, and ends up at the Pensão Globo in Lisbon, where he sets out on aimless excursions through the city. The film depicts a life in a state of transition. Sometimes it's like I'm already ...

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Scattering Stars (1994)

A paean to light, a glittering bodice of a film that rapturously unfolds its subject with a shimmering luminosity. ...

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Sleepy Haven (1993)

Matthias Müller's SLEEPY HAVEN is explicitly taking up the spirit of Kenneth Anger's FIREWORKS. SLEEPY HAVEN materializes fantasies of an erotic daydream; the film is a cocktail that merges Müller's own shots and found footage like a love act. Nude bodie ...

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Antigone (1990)

"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 the fai ...

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