Mike Hoolboom Movies

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

“Eternity takes the form of a letter about fighting disease and practicing loss, superimposed over haunting images of old teacups, people in...

How can we express the emotional experience of depression and suicide and overcome the stigmas associated with mental health? Sanguedolce’s...

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...

Lacan Palestine is a found footage essay about the troubled couple in Palestine. This country without a country has been party to imperial...

Scenes from Madonna: Truth or Dare and the music video for Madonna's "Vogue" along with other various videos are spliced together with a letter from...

Based on Hito Steyerl’s bracing 2009 essay of the same name, Cut looks at how cinema and the assembly line both cut the body in new ways,...

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...

The amazement of people as recorded in early films is the central motif of the film appropriated from the Lumiere brothers’ collections which...

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...

In 1984, Mike Cartmell began Narratives of Egypt, a four-part series that deals with the father in Prologue: Infinite Obscure, the son in In the form...

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,...

“The cinematic equivalent of flipping the bird, White Museum is an audacious and often hilarious early effort by master provocateur Mike...

Queering the haj. A man recollects a moment (was it any longer than that?) in the aptly named city of Mecca. A conversation ensues in the crowd. The...

The movie’s prelude visits Lenin’s home town of Ulyanovsk during Victory Day, the annual commemoration of WW2’s end, in an...

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

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...

Simon Weil wrote that attention is the rarest kind of generosity. How to extend this generosity to a single photograph, made in 1949 in the port city...

“In a tapestry of migratory luck, artifacts and shells, a mixed choir of images and sounds engages the paradox of a journey that loses all...

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