Movies: Mike Hoolboom

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...

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 tunnels until the cause of liberation can be seen clearly and embraced. Why do birds suddenly appear?...

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 ...

Three-part colour inquiry. Questions adapted from Frederick Douglass to Jericho Brown bring the hurt. The images have been soaked in water until everything recognizable has been stripped away, leaving behind a wash of colours, a bacterial flow....

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 primal scene of Italy’s Communist party, and for his tireless reporting and befriending the working cla...

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...

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 Lives Matter. Remembering Charlie 'Africa' Keunang. (Mike Hoolboom)...

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 creates a portrait of a exceedingly clever, yet evanescent father figure haunted by the war that sent his o...

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 acoustic cover of the Stooges’ hit which gives this movie its title, the one ranked 438 on Rolling Stone mag...

"Compilation" of five previous works of the director - Leaving Church, Damaged, 27 Thoughts About My Dad, Rain, Buffalo Death Mask - Father Auditions is a prism that reflects different images and at the same time, in the assembly of the distinguished...

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

Originally made in 16mm, as the fourth part of the feature-length wordless psychodrama collection House of Pain. Shiteater is a carefully hewn assault on a society bent on consuming itself, an homage to late capitalist ideals of corporate mergers and...

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 of the letter “X”, the lover in Cartouche, and wraps it all up in Farrago, a word meaning: a medley,...

The main character is the title....

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 ...

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 cinematic equivalent of flipping the bird, White Museum is an audacious and often hilarious early effort by master provocateur Mike Hoolboom. Viewers must wait about 30 minutes to see the one and only image in the film. In the meantime, Hoolboom...

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

Lensed in Ohio’s Broadview Developmental Center in 1967 by secret camera genius and audio visual healer Jeffrey Paull, Scrapbook tells the story of audacious autistic Donna Washington in her own words, as she encounters pictures of one of her former ...

Commissioned for LIFT’s (Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto) 30th anniversary, this brief black and white sojourn finds a father and son wandering, midway upon the journey of their lives, as the saying goes. Vincent Grenier adds slow motion...