A conversation with Canadian artist Stephen Andrews returns us to a pre-cocktail moment, when being HIV+ afforded us the consolation of certainty.

“For more than two decades Mike Hoolboom has been one of our foremost artistic witnesses of the plague of the twentieth century, HIV. A personal voice documenting and piercing the clichéd spectrum of Living With AIDS from carnal abjection to incandescent spirituality, no surviving moving image visionary surpasses him. 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. No one savours the intimations of immortality inherent in recycled footage like Mike, no one else understands how processed Super 8 can answer the question "Why are we still here when so many are gone?" Tom Waugh

“Mask is insightful, wise, poignant, honest, evocative, and shaded beautifully and sadly with longing.” Tom McSorley

“Without apparent effort it shifts from vulnerability to strength, from melancholy to humor and from personal as well as universal suffering to a comforting and soothing celebration of memory. Mike Hoolboom's film ultimately created a notion that probably does not exist in words. What is the opposite of a scar?” (Jury Statement, “Important Cinematic Works of the Festival,” Alternative Film/Video Festival, Belgrade)

“From a very strong program there were several impressive works; however there can only be one winner. The winning film highlights universal themes in a poignant, personal way. Through earnest dialogue and dreamlike imagery it laments sickness and death and how losing the ones you love is also losing part of yourself. A striking, warm film.” (International Critics (FIPRESCI) Prize, Oberhausen)