Awards: Canada Council Prize for Best Canadian Work, Images Festival, 2003; Best Film, Flicker Festival, James River, 2004; Jury Award, Yorkton Festival, 2004 (Amy)

“Amy is narrated by a model (Liisa Repo-Martell) who is painfully uncomfortable with her own body and "old woman's" face. Astonishing closing image is a tightly composed telephoto shot on the start of a marathon race among young schoolgirls, dashing toward and then across the screen in ultra-slo-mo, and accompanied by a girls' chorus hauntingly singing Brian Wilson's God Only Knows.” Robert Koehler, Variety

“Amy has home movies alternate with photographs and shots of the narrator as the artifice behind the filmmaking process becomes exposed." Diane Burgess, Vancouver International Festival

“The closing chapter Amy portrays a woman recounting her childhood in which she has been photographed by the same man over and over—she can only look at herself the way he looked at her then, and the way we are looking at her now.” Esma Moukhtar, Montevideo Catalogue

“In his films, the Canadian filmmaker Mike Hoolboom has frequently investigated how media representations can influence and damage self-perception. For example, in Amy (2004), a young woman recalls images of her childhood: a childhood in which she was photographed so frequently that she is no longer able to see herself except through the eyes of the (male, adult) photographer who, with her mother’s permission, took nude pictures of her back when she was a child. The pictures of this woman and similar ones by photographer Jock Sturges can be found both in the collections of major museums and by doing a Google image search, which will throw up an array of nude images that verge on child pornography.” Matthias Mueller, Kino und Kindheit

“A young woman reveals her feelings of violation after being photographed in the nude by a fashion photographer during her adolescence. Presented as a series of formally modeled photographs and told in voice-over commentary by an actress in a recording studio, Hoolboom underscores the theme of objectification as the young woman's memories of self-consciousness at being intimately photographed by a virtual stranger is further reinforced by substituting the voice of the model - in essence, silencing her articulation of her own thoughts - in order to create an aesthetic ideal for the video camera. In this instance, the loss of innocence comes, not from a physical violation, but from the conditionally learned consciousness of being filmed and the realization of performance.” Posted by Acquarello, Nov. 28, 2005. Check him out: http://filmref.com/siteinfo.html