Movies: Mike Hoolboom

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

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. N...

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 b...

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 their duties) who could not stop performing compulsive and repetitive gestures. They called it shell sho...

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

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)...

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...

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 nati...

A bio-doc about my pal Judy Rebick: iconic second wave Canadian feminist, radical activist, journalist and writer. She is the founding publisher of rabble.ca, Canada’s irreverent progressive online news source, and a former president of the National ...

'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 ...

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, gown...

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 al...

A hybrid of DeSade and Dali, House of Pain is a nightmare that takes place between sleep and death, where the performers appear as mute hallucinations. The film features a hallucinogenic blend of the domestic and perverse....

A lesbian call fall in and out of love while Prime Minister Wayne Gretzky wages a war against secessional Quebec for media money....

An ice cream factory worker reflects on AIDS and the new capitalism. "A move from a regime of cultural production ordered by authorship, originality and signature to one ordered by the brand, branding and simulation." This short essay doc is indebted...

"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...

“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 t...

The movie is animated by a question. Can we see what we see? I think of what is close at hand, the painting on the wall, book titles shouting from the choir on the shelf. And then further afield, to countries that have been made visible or invisible ...

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. Serial portraits in black and white....

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