The films of Mike Hoolboom
Toronto-born Mike Hoolboom is a prolific multidisciplinary artist who has been working since the early 1980s. He began filming his first images as a child, borrowing his parents' Super 8 camera. In the early 90s, Hoolboom was diagnosed with HIV; this news gave him a certain urgency to create that has led him to produce over 100 films to date.
Hoolboom made is name in 1993 with his film Frank's Cock, which won Best Canadian Short at the Toronto International Film Festival. Frank's Cock is a portrait of an anonymous man - played by Callum Keith Rennie - who recounts the loss of his HIV-positive boyfriend.
Hoolboom is a committed filmmaker who uses the power of experimental cinema to make his case, whether against capitalism, the shifting importance of artificial intelligence or injustice against the queer communities.
3 products
Frank's Cock
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An anonymous narrator recounts how he met and fell in love with an older man, Frank, who is now HIV-positive on the eve of their 10th anniversary.
Scrapbook
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In the sixties, Jeffrey Paull gave a group of young people with autism the opportunity to film themselves and the world around them. Mike Hoolboom draws from this archive to continue Paull’s mission: to express the emotions of people who are condemned by the authorities and by other people’s perceptions, to live in silence. Donna Washington, a former patient, comments on the images and reports ...
Judy Versus Capitalism
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Since the 1970s, Judy Rebick has been the face of feminist struggles in Canada. For Mike Hoolboom, she's more a "living archive" of activism and struggles for the rights of all minorities, as well as an exceptional woman who has defied her own traumas all her life. Their privileged relationship gave birth to this film, a creative hybrid between documentary and experiment. A colossal work of arc...
Frank's Cock
Subscription access
An anonymous narrator recounts how he met and fell in love with an older man, Frank, who is now HIV-positive on the eve of their 10th anniversary.
Scrapbook
Subscription access
In the sixties, Jeffrey Paull gave a group of young people with autism the opportunity to film themselves and the world around them. Mike Hoolboom draws from this archive to continue Paull’s mission: to express the emotions of people who are condemned by the authorities and by other people’s perceptions, to live in silence. Donna Washington, a former patient, comments on the images and reports ...
Judy Versus Capitalism
Subscription access
Since the 1970s, Judy Rebick has been the face of feminist struggles in Canada. For Mike Hoolboom, she's more a "living archive" of activism and struggles for the rights of all minorities, as well as an exceptional woman who has defied her own traumas all her life. Their privileged relationship gave birth to this film, a creative hybrid between documentary and experiment. A colossal work of arc...
