WED OCT 30. 7PM. Mike Hoolboom screening @ Amherst College

Canadian filmmaker Mike Hoolboom will screen and discuss three of his films on Wednesday, October 30, at 7pm in Stirn Auditorium, Amherst College. The program will include Buffalo Death Mask, which won the FIPRESCI prize at the 2013 Oberhausen Film Festival, Rain, and a preview screening of Hoolboom’s new film Second.

 “Mike Hoolboom’s films have won over thirty awards, including four awards at Oberhausen, a Golden Leopard at Locarno, and two awards for best Canadian short at the Toronto International Festival. Retrospectives of his work have been presented at many festivals and museums including the Images Festival (Toronto), Visions du Reel (Switzerland), Impakt Festival (Holland), Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen (France), Sixpack Film (Vienna) and the Buenos Aires International Festival (Argentina).
Hoolboom has written four books, Practical Dreamers: Conversations with Canadian Movie Artists (Coach House Press, 2008), Inside the Pleasure Dome: Fringe Film in Canada (Coach House Press, 2001), Plague Years (YYZ Books, 1998), and The Steve Machine (Coach House Press 2008). Since 2004 he has been working on Fringe Online (www.fringeonline.ca), a web project which makes available the archives of a number of Canadian media artists, and remains the largest publishing project in the Canadian fringe media sector.” Video Data Bank

“Mike Hoolboom has established himself over the past three decades as not only one of Canada’s greatest film artists, but as one of the most passionate and hard-working proselytizers and chroniclers of what he calls the “fringe” film/video movement.” John Davies, Xtra, Toronto, 2008.

 “Hoolboom’s works are as visually inventive as Derek Jarman’s and as politically courageous as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s in their explorations of the troubling intersections of desire, the body, the world, and the nation-state…” Tom McSorley, Take One, Toronto.

“For more than two decades Mike Hoolboom has been one of our foremost artistic witnesses of the plague of the twentieth century, HIV. Buffalo Death Mask is a three-part meditation — visual, oral and haptic, both campy and ecstatic — on survival, mourning, memory, love and community. A conversation between Hoolboom and visual artist Stephen Andrews, both long time survivors of the retrovirus, floats over what seems to be a dream of Toronto and some of its ghosts." Tom Waugh

This event is sponsored by the Eastman Fund, the Amherst College Film and Media Studies Department, the Hampshire College Film/Photo/Video program and the Mount Holyoke Film Studies Department.