Mike Hoolboom Movies

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....

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

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....

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...

“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...

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

A beguiling, humorous presentation of cinematic impermanence. A naked man (Hoolboom), tilted 90 degrees by the camera angle, paints a black shape on...

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

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...

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

Half-hour digest of Buddhist perception theory.

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

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...

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...

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

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

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

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

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...

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...