Movies: Mike Hoolboom

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

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,...

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...

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 Is...

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

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 reflecti...

“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 i...

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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....

“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 cha...

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

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 restitche...

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 nati...

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 primari...

Unable to leave my apartment universe and attend the Alchemy Film and Moving Image Fest in Scotland, I sent along this digital stand-in instead, composed and commissioned as an introduction to Aftermath, a four-part, feature-length found footage bio-...

Portrait moments collected across the world carry powerful situations and stand out from the grip of the image with an expression, a tear, a flame, a scar or a position of the body. The glances and gestures directed beyond the frame of the photograph...

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, popul...

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 stan...

Mirrors features a series of mirrors clipped from the movies of Ingmar Bergman. A mise-en-abyme, a reflection on reflections, in other words, an endless looking, or relooking. The mirror (phase) offers a time without end, a glassy eye that throws bac...

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...