A love story set in the global anti-austerity demonstrations. As citizens take back their streets, two women meet and fall in love. What geometry of desire will help overthrow the state? What micro-politics of sharing and communality will provide fuel for demonstrations that will remove and replace...
Made on a sunny afternoon. A last stand of burning light. Shot in 1985, released in 1990 with a soundtrack by Kaiser Nietzsche (John Kamevaar, Thomas Handy), new soundtrack and title in 2016.
Commissioned for LIFT’s (Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto) 30th anniversary, this brief black and white sojourn finds a father and son wandering, midway upon the journey of their lives, as the saying goes. Vincent Grenier adds slow motion heat to the looking with his first emulsion...
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 died suddenly and unexpectedly of colon cancer in 2001, but not before lending grace to more than fourty low-tech wonders of cross-dressing satire. An...
Originally cast as the second part of a six-part feature Panic Bodies (1998), the original 16mm negatives were rescued courtesy of the Cinematheque Quebecoise, then rescanned, recut, and reimagined. They were shot in 1996, the year the AIDS cocktail arrived. It’s not uncommon during illness to...
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 to exclude. Who is fully human and who works for minimum wage, or no wage at all? Between the titles, home-made animations pulse across the frame...
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 class he was jailed for over a decade. The state...
In this dramatic short, a refugee crosses the ocean to escape the ravages of war, but loses family along the way. The musings of poets (Brand, Carson, Vuong) become his conscience and reflection. Shot with a lyric intensity, as if everything was being seen for the first or final time, in Colombia,...
“The cinematic equivalent of flipping the bird, White Museum is an audacious and often hilarious early effort by master provocateur Mike Hoolboom. Viewers must wait about 30 minutes to see the one and only image in the film. In the meantime, Hoolboom expounds on everything from old lovers to...
This ten-minute video lecture was commissioned by Haema Svanesan and Marina DeMaio who are putting together a Buddhism and Art confab called In the Present Moment: Buddhism, Contemporary Art, and Social Practice at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria in October, 2019. I was supposed to be on a...
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 music, the music of Coleman Hawkins for example, is an authentic relationship, equal to human company. The movie closes with Hawkins playing one of his...
How can we express the emotional experience of depression and suicide and overcome the stigmas associated with mental health? Sanguedolce’s experimental documentary brings together four artists (including experimental filmmaker Mike Hoolboom), who speak with refreshing honesty about how thoughts...
“Panic Bodies consists of six parts or chapters, varying in length and style. Each suggests a new approach to these returning questions: what does it mean to have a body; to be a body, and what does this body want? Hoolboom appears in the framing chapters, and in between others take his place,...
