Mike Hoolboom

Born in 1959 in Toronto, where he lives and works. He studied Media Arts at Sheridan College from 1980 to 1983. He worked at the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Center for three years before co-directing the venue Pleasure Dome, a series of experimental film and video programmed by artists. Since 1980, Mike Hoolboom has completed more than 25 films, published numerous articles on avant-garde film and traveled as a curator of Canadian "fringe films" - as he calls them - or international film art throughout Canada, Europe and the USA.

In 1997 he published the book "Inside the Pleasure Dome: Fringe Film in Canada.", in 1998 "Plague Years: a life in underground movies" (XYZbooks).

Mike Hoolboom is one of Canada's most productive and best-known avant-garde filmmakers; his films and videos are regularly presented at international festivals and often win awards. Although he has long worked exclusively with film and still prefers the aesthetics of the cinematic, in recent years he has increasingly used the video camera for his documentary recordings. For his fascination with light and shadow, fragmented abstract forms, views of the sky and fireworks, however, he has remained faithful to the Super 8 material that he used at the beginning of his cinematic work in the early 1980s.

In the montage of found home movies, the author Hoolboom is often hidden, lost in the passion for collecting of the master editor Hoolboom. He is a hunter and collector of his own and appropriated images: on the one hand from the private sources of various filmmaker friends and families - including his own - on the other, Hollywood cinema and its magical representations are used shamelessly and brilliantly for the visualization of his essayistic texts.

At times, his stories take on a new melodramatic dimension precisely through the use of charged set pieces from the world of feature films and become an arena of emotions in which tears, love, fear, death, violence and intense pathos are not shied away from.

Hoolboom explores the bodies of his friends just as thoroughly as the potential of the film material. He creates multifaceted adaptations on the optical bench and in the darkroom, often rubbing the found and his own images against his texts, which he places in a poetic dialog with the images with the physicality of voice or writing. The themes of his fragmentary, auto/biographical and fictional narratives range from homosexual love, the disease AIDS, fragility, the body, the experience of death to the search for love, "home", family and artistic expression." (Brigitta Burger-Utzer)

Program
Escape in Canada (CAN 1993, 16mm, sw, 9 Min.)
Mexico (Co-Regie: Steve Sanguedolce, CAN 1992, 16mm, F, 35 Min.)
Careful Breaking (CAN 1992, 16mm, sw & F, 7 Min.)
Pensão Globo (R.: Matthias Müller; Text: M. H. D 1997, 16mm, F, 15 Min.)
Tom (CAN 2002, video, sw & F, 74 Min.)
brand (CAN 1989, 16mm, F, 6 Min.)
Letters from Home (CAN 1996, 16mm, F, 15 Min.)
Frank's Cock (CAN 1993, 16mm, F, 8 Min.)
Shooting Blanks (Co-Regie: Shaun Chappelle, CAN 1996, 16mm, F, 8 Min.)
In My Car (CAN 1998, 16mm, sw, 5,30 Min.)
Passing On (CAN 1997, 16mm, F, 18 Min.)