Saturday, October 24th
8:00PM / $5.00
Beverages available for purchase
Mark (70 minutes, 2009)
“Society is not first of all a milieu for exchange where the essential would be to circulate or to cause to circulate, but rather a socius of inscription where the essential thing is to mark and to be marked.” Deleuze and Guatarri, Anti-Oedipus
“Mark is an elegiac portrait of his friend and collaborator, Mark Karbusicky, who died in 2007. Mark weaves together childhood snapshots, found footage, and interviews with Karbusicky’s friends, family, and longtime partner, transsexual performance artist Mirha-Soleil Ross, to map the contours of a life lived “in the background” and trace the mark he left on the communities around him. Curator Mark Webber notes, “few filmmakers use re-appropriated footage in such an emotive way…Hoolboom’s recent work is in profound sympathy with the human condition that speaks directly to our hearts.” (Amy Beste, Conversations on the Edge, Chicago)
“Mark died at age 35, and Hoolboom went looking for answers, talking to friends, probing Mark’s life of service to others and to animal rights, collecting images and stories. What he finds are only faint traces of Mark’s time on earth, in the streets and sad apartments, in a child he meets by chance. What he makes is a deeply moving reflection on relationship and the mysteries of absence and presence. A film that breathes with an urgent necessity all its own. Hoolboom’s finest work to date.” (Bruno Dequen, Festival de Nouveau Cinema, Montreal)
Bio
Mike Hoolboom is a Canadian artist working in film and video. He has made twenty films and videos which have appeared in over four hundred festivals, garnering thirty awards, including four awards in Oberhausen, a Golden Leopard at Locarno, and he has twice won the award for the best Canadian short at the Toronto International Festival. He has been granted two lifetime achievement awards, the first from the city of Toronto, and the second from the Mediawave Festival in Hungary.
He has enjoyed retrospectives of his work at the Images Festival (Toronto), Visions du Reel (Switzerland), Cork International Festival (Ireland), Cinema de Balie (Amsterdam), Mediawave Festival (Hungary), Impakt Festival (Holland), Vila do Conde Festival (Portugal), Jihlava Documentary Festival (Czech Republic), Stuttgarter Filmwinter (Germany), Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen (France), Sixpack Film (Vienna) and the Buenos Aires International Festival (Argentina).
He is a founding member of the Pleasure Dome screening collective and has worked as the artistic director of the Images Festival and as the experimental film co-ordinator at Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre.
Mike Hoolboom has written three non-fiction books, “Practical Dreamers: Conversations with Canadian Movie Artists” (Coach House, 2008),”Inside the Pleasure Dome: Fringe Film in Canada” (Coach House Press, 2001) and “Plague Years” (YYZ Books, 1998) a tongue-in-chic autobiography. His first novel “The Steve Machine” was published by Coach House Press in the fall of 2008. He has published more than one hundred articles on fringe media which have appeared in magazines and catalogues around the world.
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. This ongoing project currently consists of hundreds of pages of transcripts, reviews, interviews and scripts, and remains the largest publishing project in the Canadian fringe media sector.
