Tom

A cinematic firestorm of found footage and pilfered Hollywood images, Mike Hoolboom’s hallucinatory Tom – described by the filmmaker as, "Cinema as déjà vu, or déjà voodoo" – pays mesmerizing experimental tribute to the life and work of friend and fellow avant-gardist Tom Chomont, and was selected by a national panel of film critics as one of Canada’s Top Ten of 2002.

"Clips from home movies, mainstream Hollywood cinema and archival films meld seamlessly with new material to drive this most unusual of biopics. The appropriated images – familiar, yet estranged from their original context – are repositioned to illustrate the story of Tom’s life. Scenes stream past, decades roll by and hundreds of films collide in a hypnotic rush. Chomont, a notorious video artist and key member of the New York underground, now battles Parkinson’s disease and AIDS. Against the backdrop of New York City, this raconteur extraordinaire relates stories of infanticide, a mobster’s love, incest, S&M, fetishism and a rare white light which he imagines as both the beginning and the end of all life"

— Liz Czach, Toronto International Film Festival

"A dazzling experimental documentary... With this extraordinary portrait, Hoolboom creates a different kind of biography film."

— Diane Burgess, Vancouver International Film Festival