Movies: Mike Hoolboom

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....

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

“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.” San Francisco International Festival Catalogue, 1999...

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?...

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...

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 momen...

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)....

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...

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

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 bein...

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....

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 ...

Based on Lisa Robertson’s The Nilling, the movie offers poetry as antidote to the exclusions of state and identity....

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....

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

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

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, alternate...

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...

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...

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...