Mike Hoolboom Movies

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

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

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...

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...

“After the death of my mother, I began a suite of women superstar portraits. They were scientists, poets and activists, a second family busy...

A meditation on birth, silence and the American cinema, sealed with a kiss. A single gesture into light.

How to use this old technology of the postcard, with its marriage of image and text, its insistence that every exchange has two-sides which can never...

Part 6 of 7-part bio-feature Public Lighting (2004).

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...

Part 7 of 9-part feature Imitations of Life (2003).

Short by Mike Hoolboom.

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...

“Panic Bodies consists of six parts or chapters, varying in length and style. Each suggests a new approach to these returning questions: what...

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...

A life lived in cars and a last race with the devil...

Part 3 of 9-part feature Imitations of Life (2003).

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...

Part 5 of 9-part feature Imitations of Life (2003).

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...

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