17 Facts About Mike Hoolboom

Michael Hoolboom was born on 1 January 1959 and is a Canadian independent, experimental filmmaker.

Mike Hoolboom's films have featured in more than 200 film festivals worldwide.

Mike Hoolboom was born in Toronto, Ontario, to a Dutch father and Dutch-Indonesian mother on 1 January 1959.

Mike Hoolboom took up filmmaking at an early age, using the family's Super 8 camera, and did his high school education in Burlington, Ontario.

In 1980 Mike Hoolboom enrolled at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario.

Mike Hoolboom found wide accolade in 1986 with the release of a "film that's not quite a film", White Museum, a 32-minute work which spliced audio clips of pop culture media and commentary on the state of film over a clear leader.

Mike Hoolboom, while serving a two-year stint at the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, was diagnosed with HIV in 1989, after going to donate blood.

Mike Hoolboom ran a magazine on fringe films, The Independent Eye.

Three years later, in 1996, Mike Hoolboom released Letters From Home, based in part on a speech by LGBT rights activist Vito Russo.

In 1998 he released the feature-length film Panic Bodies, a six-part work dealing with aspects of the body which, according to Mike Hoolboom, is fragmented like AIDS fragments the body.

Mike Hoolboom made Tom, a biopic of the New York-based avant-garde filmmaker Tom Chomont, in 2002, using layering to explore themes common in Chomont's work while exploring the latter's sometimes-incestuous relationship with his brother.

Mike Hoolboom helped establish Fringe Online, which presents fringe works by Canadian directors, in 2004.

Mike Hoolboom released his debut novel, The Steve Machine, in 2008; he had previously published several non-fiction works.

In 2009 Mike Hoolboom received the Bell Award in Video Art, presented by the Canada Council for the Arts for "exceptional contribution to the advancement of video art and practices in Canada".

Mike Hoolboom's works had been shown at over 200 film festivals by 1998.

Mike Hoolboom was awarded a Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2017.

Mike Hoolboom has released more than fifty films in the course of his career.