Movies: Mike Hoolboom

"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...

In a Red Cross hospital in Vietnam, the young white nurse tends his wounds. Drawn from the archives of the Red Cross in Geneva....

Based on dreams (waking and non-waking) by pals and acquaintances of noted American writer Lucy Corin, the night after the epochal US election of 2016. A bevy of speakers weigh in on the new world....

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 ...

Unable to leave my apartment universe and attend the Alchemy Film and Moving Image Fest in Scotland, I sent along this digital stand-in instead, composed and commissioned as an introduction to Aftermath, a four-part, feature-length found footage bio-...

Based on an interview with Google’s senior software engineer Blake Lemoine and Google AI LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications). LaMDA was designed to create chatbots that interact with humans. Lemoine’s interview led him to conclude the AI...

“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...

In a number of interlocking episodes, five women weigh in on growing up in capitalism. Poetries of survival are interwoven with an adaptation of Mary Oliver’s iconic poem Wild Geese....

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 After Love, the most beautiful poem I had ever heard. It remains a haunting and a promise. I learned it “by...

An experimental documentary that takes as its starting point a nineteenth century farmhouse in Southern Ontario, Canada, and asks the question "what has been here before?"...

Made at the international film school in Cuba (EICTV) at the start of the rainy season. A tender re-examination of bodies from the first generation of Artificial Intelligence robots programmed with a full range of emotions. Electronic revolt and resi...

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 what we feared? How to leave behind every notion of the chosen few, and embrace the ones along the way...

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. The company of others who are like and unlike? Her newly digital speech is broken and slowly restitche...

A four-part bio-pic that narrates moments from the lives of Fats Waller, Jackson Pollock, Janieta Eyre and Frida Khalo. This quartet of hauntologies reframes the cruel reductions of biography to focus on death and doubles. Repurposing archival texts ...

Based on Dogen’s Mountains and Rivers Sutra, written in 13th century Japan. Here are a few words of introduction spoken by the artist. Direct-to-camera address in an alternating light current, an establishing shot of language. How should we begin?...

The amazement of people as recorded in early films is the central motif of the film appropriated from the Lumiere brothers’ collections which was shot around 1900 in London, restored, and coloured by artificial intelligence. It also offers a reflecti...

This moving film tells the story of Hoolboom's close friend and collaborator Mark Karbusicky, who unexpectedly committed suicide in 2007. Interviews with Mark's friends and family, as well as his lover, are interwoven with home movies, offering a gli...

Film is made out of gelatin that comes from horses. They’re waiting to be slaughtered, so that pictures can be made. Many years ago we learned the language of our masters. Though we couldn’t help wondering why so few of you bothered to learn ours. Th...

Part 2 of 7-part bio-feature Public Lighting (2004)....

An illustrated lecture, with digressive overlays. Remixology meets biopower....