Mike Hoolboom Movies

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

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...

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

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...

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

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

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...

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...

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

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...

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...

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...

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

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...

How does the body remember? Doctors began treating tens of thousands troops (those who were not shot by their own comrades for failing to perform...

In a series of 23 vignettes, the artist offers up memories of his mother who died in March 2020. If offers a mix of analog snaps and diary footage...

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

Short by Mike Hoolboom.

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

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