Movies: Mike Hoolboom

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 pr...

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

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....

"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...

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

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

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 catastroph...

“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 ecologi...

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?...

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

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 ...

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....

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...

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 ...

A four-part bio-pic that narrates moments from the lives of Fats Waller, Jackson Pollock, Janieta Eyre and Frida Khalo. This quartet of hauntologies reframes the cruel reductions of biography to focus on death and doubles. Repurposing archival texts ...

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 horsebac...

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

"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 mus...

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?"...

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...