Mike Hoolboom

A movie essay using theory fragments from porn studies pioneer Linda Williams, radical gender theorist Paul Preciado, feminist theorists Hortense...

“Shot in an abandoned warehouse, documenting a contemporary adaptation of the Oedipus story by a group of Toronto experimental filmmakers,...

“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...

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...

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...

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...

Matthias Müller's SLEEPY HAVEN is explicitly taking up the spirit of Kenneth Anger's FIREWORKS. SLEEPY HAVEN materializes fantasies of an erotic...

The explosive story of how a stubborn band of independent filmmakers started a film co-operative that became the most highly respected and...

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

How can we express the emotional experience of depression and suicide and overcome the stigmas associated with mental health? Sanguedolce’s...

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

"Hoolboom" is a film that Arts Toronto commissioned local filmmaker Wrik Mead to make based on his impressions of fellow filmmaker Mike Hoolboom....

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

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

Personal film essay about two pandemics: AIDS and Coronavirus. Body memorials, survivor stories, remembrances. Both plagues are reframed by...

“The cinematic equivalent of flipping the bird, White Museum is an audacious and often hilarious early effort by master provocateur Mike...

One of my father's favourite expressions, mostly passed away now: for the birds. Meaning: that was nothing. In this aviary anthology, the narrator...

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...

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...

Eva Marie Rodbro’s embedded ethnographic maestro short, originally shot in Brownwood, Texas in 2009, is given a fan remake. Night vision animal...

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...

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,...

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...

A found footage collection of 26 AIDS adverts. Freud uncovered the mysterious connection between language and bodies at the same moment that moving...

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...

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...

Half-hour digest of Buddhist perception theory.

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

Originally cast as the second part of a six-part feature Panic Bodies (1998), the original 16mm negatives were rescued courtesy of the Cinematheque...

Commissioned for The Colin Campbell Sessions by Lisa Steele at Vtape, one of a half dozen shorts made in tribute to one of our video dads. Colin had...

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

News from another pandemic, the one that "changed everything" before it fell out of the news cycle and collective memory, except for the newly...

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

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...

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

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

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

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

In a suite of interviews for his “second first feature” Godard submitted to the slings and arrows of North American media interrogators...

Based on texts gleaned from Catherine Bush’s novel Blaze Island, this multi-layered collage offers a fleeting love story on a distant shore....

This miniature presents an extensive reflection on ways of watching, reception and rebellion against indoctrination and control. Making decisions...

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...

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...

Vancouver composer and sound ecologist Hildegard Westerkamp was the only woman to participate in the original version of the World Soundscape project...

The amazement of people as recorded in early films is the central motif of the film appropriated from the Lumiere brothers’ collections which...

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...

Short by Mike Hoolboom.

Based on Hito Steyerl’s bracing 2009 essay of the same name, Cut looks at how cinema and the assembly line both cut the body in new ways,...

A memory ritual performed in an enclosed space over twenty-four hours. Featuring dance, costume, lard, and a single performer. The film closes with...

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...

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...

“After the death of my mother, I began a suite of women superstar portraits. They were scientists, poets and activists, a second family busy...

A movie essay using theory fragments from porn studies pioneer Linda Williams, radical gender theorist Paul Preciado, feminist theorists Hortense...

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...

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...

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...

A terrible virus finally brings down the internet, and humans look out from the wreckage in the aftermath. Five weigh in with personal recollections:...

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...

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 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...

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

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...

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

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...

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

"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...

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...

A monologue about AIDS, rendered in split-screens generously furbished with images from Terminator 2, science flicks, Michael Jackson and home...

"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...

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...

Three-part colour inquiry. Questions adapted from Frederick Douglass to Jericho Brown bring the hurt. The images have been soaked in water until...

Lensed in Ohio’s Broadview Developmental Center in 1967 by secret camera genius and audio visual healer Jeffrey Paull, Scrapbook tells the...

Passing On, a lyrical, typically confessional effort that encapsulates what's preceded it. Hoolboom's dance with death — a motif acknowledged...

A retrospective based on an introspective vision, this stream of still pictures, unfolding to the rhythm of the voice-over (delivered by Steve...

Based on Dogen’s Mountains and Rivers Sutra, written in 13th century Japan. Here are a few words of introduction spoken by the artist....

Imitations of life consist of ten chapters, each one of which has an individual intonation and cinematographic style. The chapters: In the Future,...

"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...

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

Commissioned for LIFT’s (Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto) 30th anniversary, this brief black and white sojourn finds a father and...

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

After a purported bike accident, the nameless amnesiac undertakes audio-visual therapy by producing a series of one-minute shots through the streets...

'Amy, is narrated by a model (Liisa Repo-Martell) who’s painfully uncomfortable with her own body and “old woman’s” face....

This moving film tells the story of Hoolboom's close friend and collaborator Mark Karbusicky, who unexpectedly committed suicide in 2007. Interviews...

“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,...

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...

A found footage collection of 26 AIDS adverts. Freud uncovered the mysterious connection between language and bodies at the same moment that moving...

An overwhelming and luminescent reflection on death, AIDS and living, Letters from Home is a compelling montage of mini-portraits intercut with found...

The main character is the title.

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,...

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...

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...

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

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...

"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...

"In Mexico, experimental filmmakers Hoolboom and Steve Sanguedolce set out to dissect the travel bug. Hoolboom's deadpan, incisive voice-over offers...

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...

“Panic Bodies consists of six parts or chapters, varying in length and style. Each suggests a new approach to these returning questions: what...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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...

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

Based on an interview with Google’s senior software engineer Blake Lemoine and Google AI LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications)....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

Imitations of life consist of ten chapters, each one of which has an individual intonation and cinematographic style. The chapters: In the Future,...

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...

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

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...

A reflection on colour in fifteen camera tests.

A reflection on colour in fifteen camera tests.

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....

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...

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...

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...

Lacan Palestine is a found footage essay about the troubled couple in Palestine. This country without a country has been party to imperial...

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

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?...

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

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...

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....

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

Lacan Palestine is a found footage essay about the troubled couple in Palestine. This country without a country has been party to imperial...

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...

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?...

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...

Lacan Palestine is a found footage essay about the troubled couple in Palestine. This country without a country has been party to imperial...

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

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...

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

A reflection on colour in fifteen camera tests.

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

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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

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?...

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?...

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...

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....

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....

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....

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

Lacan Palestine is a found footage essay about the troubled couple in Palestine. This country without a country has been party to imperial...

Lacan Palestine is a found footage essay about the troubled couple in Palestine. This country without a country has been party to imperial...

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

A reflection on colour in fifteen camera tests.

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...

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

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....

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....

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

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...

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...

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...

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

Lacan Palestine is a found footage essay about the troubled couple in Palestine. This country without a country has been party to imperial...

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?...

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?...

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

"Compilation" of five previous works of the director - Leaving Church, Damaged, 27 Thoughts About My Dad, Rain, Buffalo Death Mask - Father Auditions...

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

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

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

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

A bio-doc about my pal Judy Rebick: iconic second wave Canadian feminist, radical activist, journalist and writer. She is the founding publisher of...

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

Made at the international film school in Cuba (EICTV) at the start of the rainy season. A tender re-examination of bodies from the first generation...

In a series of simple frames, the often misunderstood practice of Zen takes shape as basketball bliss. Now in retirement, the greatest defensive...

"Hoolboom" is a film that Arts Toronto commissioned local filmmaker Wrik Mead to make based on his impressions of fellow filmmaker Mike Hoolboom....

The movie’s prelude visits Lenin’s home town of Ulyanovsk during Victory Day, the annual commemoration of WW2’s end, in an...

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...

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...

A terrible virus finally brings down the internet, and humans look out from the wreckage in the aftermath. Five weigh in with personal recollections:...

An ice cream factory worker reflects on AIDS and the new capitalism. "A move from a regime of cultural production ordered by authorship, originality...

Originally made in 16mm, as the fourth part of the feature-length wordless psychodrama collection House of Pain. Shiteater is a carefully hewn...

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...