Mike Hoolboom

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 gone, become a ghost of myself.

“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 pitiless growth and decay, drives a dense montage, woven with guns and prayers.” - Gary Popovich

"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 film.

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 bodies of sailors are flaring up in flickering solarization effects; they are given an ardent aura of physical desire by this tattooing of the film emulsion. Müller only gradually changes his material metaphors to metaphors of love. But it is not only FIREWORKS the film is alluding to; there is yet another classic shimmering through Müller's imagery: Jean Genet's Un Chant d'Amour.

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 filmmaking scene. Packed with rare archival footage, dynamic film excerpts, and hilarious interviews, this documentary traces the history of the legendary Winnipeg Film Group. We hear candid behind the scenes stories that illuminate the storied rise of acclaimed filmmakers like John Paizs (Crime Wave), Guy Maddin (Tales From The Gimli Hospital, My Winnipeg) Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan (We’re Talking Vulva, Good Citizen, Betty Baker) and Caroline Monnet (Ikwe). Often mired in controversy, the Film Group has been acclaimed at film festivals around the world – attested to by several Toronto film luminaries in the film – for subversive, original filmmaking. This documentary continues that tradition of bold, exuberant work.

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

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?"

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 spirituality, no surviving moving image visionary surpasses him. Buffalo Death Mask is a three-part meditation — visual, oral and haptic, both campy and ecstatic — on survival, mourning, memory, love and community. A conversation between Hoolboom and visual artist Stephen Andrews, both long time survivors of the retrovirus, floats over what seems to be a dream of Toronto and some of its ghosts. No one savours the intimations of immortality inherent in recycled footage like Mike, no one else understands how processed Super 8 can answer the question “Why are we still here when so many are gone?"

“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 failure to find any value but parody.” - Gary Popovich

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 with refreshing honesty about how thoughts of suicide have dominated their personal and creative lives. Shot on 16mm and hand-coloured, the flow of images creates a poetic visual response to the stories presented on the soundtrack and allows space for reflection.

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 inserted in his 1998 travelogue. The utopian city as represented in "Vacancy" is a place abandoned from its inhabitants, a museum kept alive by its staff only.

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 temporary pornutopias. Why not name it a small collection, a modest archive of sexual imageries and pleasures? The relationship between monopoly capitalism and sexual imaging is laid bare, along with the production of a gendered subject, the question of post-pornography and its new identity formations.

'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 and then across the screen in ultra-slo-mo, and accompanied by a girls’ chorus hauntingly singing Brian Wilson’s God Only Knows. Widely eclectic lensing and looks in various media and in color and black-and-white flow nicely from one section to the next, aided by gifted editor Mark Karbusicky.' ~ Robert Koehler, Variety - Part 7 of 7-part bio-feature Public Lighting (2004).

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 a single, imaginary locale. Distant echoes of stories of the sea mingle with the banality of today's touristy beachlife. In its collage of places of expectation and with its seductive prospects of the sea, Beacon sets off on a journey with no distinct destination.

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. Now we had each other.

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. Now we had each other.

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 rubber boots to spend a quiet afternoon at the zoo. Barb is gang-raped by soldiers while taking a short cut through a restrictive zone. Fearful of infection, Alex begs her to take an AIDS test. With a world imploding around them, Barb decides to announce her result as the punchline of a comic routine. At first, Alex can't see the joke, but she eventually joins in and engineers an attempt to make love without touching.

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 rubber boots to spend a quiet afternoon at the zoo. Barb is gang-raped by soldiers while taking a short cut through a restrictive zone. Fearful of infection, Alex begs her to take an AIDS test. With a world imploding around them, Barb decides to announce her result as the punchline of a comic routine. At first, Alex can't see the joke, but she eventually joins in and engineers an attempt to make love without touching.

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 rubber boots to spend a quiet afternoon at the zoo. Barb is gang-raped by soldiers while taking a short cut through a restrictive zone. Fearful of infection, Alex begs her to take an AIDS test. With a world imploding around them, Barb decides to announce her result as the punchline of a comic routine. At first, Alex can't see the joke, but she eventually joins in and engineers an attempt to make love without touching.

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

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

"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 film.

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 of Toronto. The result is an episodic love letter set against the city's intimacies and haunts, populated by old and new acquaintances, while the disembodied voiceover weighs in on gender, animal, and the end of literary culture. Beginning from the position of the body in fugue, Incident Reports traces the most intimate of daily life changes through chronicling a back beat of the city's endless transformation.

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.

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 scenes featuring horses, remembering Jacinto. The first is a daytime forest haunting that winds up at a carousel, the second a rainy street in Portugal, the finale a nighttime vigil of fire and water.

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, finding a promised land in each other. Based on an excerpt from the poem "Red Sea: April 2002" by Aurora Levins Morales, a disabled Puerto Rican Jewish writer and activist.

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

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 Madvo project.

"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 fast-fading pasts and personal mythologies, and reflections on the anxious states created by the body's fragile claims on time and space. It's about being a stranger in your own skin. Panic Bodies perfects the phantom quality of any good work about mourning, but it is not reducible to that. It is also enlivened by the intimacy that comes from having made a spectacle of personal secrets." (Kathleen Pirrie Adams, Xtra)

"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 fast-fading pasts and personal mythologies, and reflections on the anxious states created by the body's fragile claims on time and space. It's about being a stranger in your own skin. Panic Bodies perfects the phantom quality of any good work about mourning, but it is not reducible to that. It is also enlivened by the intimacy that comes from having made a spectacle of personal secrets." (Kathleen Pirrie Adams, Xtra)

"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 fast-fading pasts and personal mythologies, and reflections on the anxious states created by the body's fragile claims on time and space. It's about being a stranger in your own skin. Panic Bodies perfects the phantom quality of any good work about mourning, but it is not reducible to that. It is also enlivened by the intimacy that comes from having made a spectacle of personal secrets." (Kathleen Pirrie Adams, Xtra)

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, while her's clock-spitting, bathing-besuited figure lifts weights in a frank measure of indifference. Their touch promotes a shimmering aura of light, a celestial forcefield which they lash against, finally retiring to the kitchen with a clutch of tools to fine tune desire. Could I fix you? Donning each other's clothes, they fly off together to the strains of Strauss's Blue Danube Waltz.

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 closes with Hawkins playing one of his signature tunes, the jazz standard Lover Man, along with Cozy Cole (drums), Barry Galbrath (guitar), Johnny Guaneri (piano) and Milt Hinton (bass). The midsection is occupied by an outdoors swimming pool, along with a voice-over extolling the virtues of frustration.

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 question carried extra weight after the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic, as movie makers struggled to find combinations of pictures that might help create the conditions for safer sex.

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, Mos Def, Frankenstein and cinema’s first kiss.