Mike Hoolboom Movies

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

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...

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...

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

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

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....

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

Originally made in 16mm, as the fourth part of the feature-length wordless psychodrama collection House of Pain.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...

Short by Mike Hoolboom.

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...