Begun with a speech by Vito Russo, Letters invites a chorus of speakers to sound off on AIDS, love and death. Impelled by a variety of formal procedures, this series of mini-portraits are generously furnished with found footage extracts, hand-processed dilemmas, home movies, super-8 psychodramas, pixilated phantasms, intergalactic warfare and a hot kiss in a cool shower.

“For a work which transforms and transcends the essay film, for its stunning vision and intensely moving testimony of life in the age of AIDS, the 1996 NFB-John Spotton Award goes to Mike Hoolboom’s Letters From Home.” Toronto International Festival Short Film Jury

"Mike Hoolboom has produced an absolutely sensational work, not only by the extreme density and intelligence of the witnesses who appear in the film, but also by the visual quality and inventiveness of his cinematographic language. Each shot, each edit has a message of pure aesthetics in this film. An overwhelming and luminescent reflection on death, AIDS and the living. Fifteen minutes to live!" (Image and Nation Catalogue, Montreal)

“An overwhelming and luminescent reflection on death, AIDS and living, Letters from Home is a compelling montage of mini-portraits intercut with found footage, home movies, super-8 dramas.” (Sheffield International Documentary Festival)

"Letters From Home is an impassioned investigation of the politics of disease. It is also something more. If a full comprehension of life including the recognition of death's constant presence, even in our death-denying culture, Letters offers a cogent, courageous rendering of this notion. It also demonstrates again that the penetrating and poignant films of Mike Hoolboom comprise one of Canadian cinema's most compelling illuminations of those ephemeral outlines of perception we call life and death." (Tom McSorley, Take One)

"The future is not what it used to be"—and in this intensely lyrical award-winning work Mike Hoolboom tells us why by creating a dialogue between himself and the late, great Vito Russo. It is both a testimony to life in the age of AIDS and a call to smash the stereotypes that threaten to ghettoize this plague". (Inside Out Catalogue)

"A visual elegy, a sepia mosaic of images and faces, a shattered dream, a battle... Here, in a few words, are some of the things evoked by Mike Hoolboom's film Letters From Home. Not forgetting AIDS, of course - the central theme. A unique account gradually takes shape through several different voices. Many and varied are the dreams, memories, fears, thoughts and revolts that the illness provokes and which emanate from the individual and the collective. In the images that follow, the fragile material captured on film forms a muted and painful lament. They evoke childhood, loves, struggles and doubts. Daringly and unexpectedly juxtaposed, they sometimes raise a smile. They are the tragi-comic archives of men desperately trying to free themselves from the laws of gravity, accompanied by the soft, nostalgic crooning of Billie Holiday. The images of a bride in her wedding dress, running alone. Some of the sequences play upon a delicious asynchronism with the voices off-camera, or else illustrate them evasively. Little by little the film reveals its complexity, but it is capable of changing its rhythm, slowing down or accelerating, then concentrating on a face, leaving aside the special effects and superimpositions in order to simply listen, allowing a deep emotion to emerge. For the experimental nature of Mike Hoolboom's work never intrudes upon the concrete, personal words of these letters, which also suffuse a ray of hope. Despite the everyday reality of rejection. Here the stricken are no longer nameless strangers, they are acquaintances, friends, loved ones." (Bertrand Bacqué, Visions du Réel Catalogue)