Back to homepage

Mark

Mark

(Mark), Mike Hoolboom / CDN, 2009
English / Czech subtitles, 70 min

Award-winning Canadian filmmaker and writer Mike Hoolboom makes his Chicago debut appearance with the premiere of Mark (2009), an elegiac portrait of his friend and collaborator, Mark Karbusicky, who committed suicide 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.”

Mike Hoolboom is a Canadian artist working in film and video. He has made over fifty films and videos, though most have been withdrawn from circulation, approximately a dozen remain on view. His work has appeared in over four hundred festivals, garnering thirty awards. He has been granted the Tom Berner Award for community service and two lifetime achievement awards, the first from the city of Toronto, and the second from the Mediawave Festival in Hungary.

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.

Since 2004 he has been working on Fringe Online, a web project which makes available the archives of 40 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.

The filmmaker, Mike Hoolboom, will make a personal appearance at the screening! The discussion with author will follow the screening. The screening is in partnership with the International Documentary Film Festival Jihlava.