Director, Producer, Screenwriter, Editor, Cinematographer

(b. January 1, 1955 Kitchener, Ontario)

Philip Hoffman received a diploma in media arts from Sheridan College in 1979 and a B.A. in English literature from Wilfrid Laurier University in 1987. While a student at Sheridan, he was part of that burgeoning group of filmmakers, including Richard Kerr and Mike Hoolboom, who came to be known as the Escarpment School. He returned to Sheridan College as a full-time instructor in 1986, and later, joined the film and video department at York University in 1999. Every summer since 1994, Hoffman has run his own craft-centered film workshop at Mount Forest, Ontario.

If, according to Mike Hoolboom, "the Escarpment School typically conjoins memory and landscape in a home-movie, documentary-based production that is at once personal, poetic and reflexive," Hoffman inflects these priorities in a distinctly personal way. If the works of Rick Hancox repeatedly return to the sites of his youth, Hoffman's entail an archaeological journey toward unknown places and unfamiliar times.

Almost without exception, Hoffman's work involves exorcism and espousal, from the shuffling off of inadequate ideas concerning his sense of self in the early films (On the Pond, 1978; The Road Ended at the Beach, 1983) to a Buddhist-like reconciliation with the inevitability of loss and death that characterizes his later works: Somewhere Between Jalostotitlan & Encarnacion (1984); ?O, Zoo! (The Making of a Fiction Film) (1986); Kitchener-Berlin (1990) and What these ashes wanted (2001). Hoffman contests the claim to the truth characteristic of conventional documentaries; ?O, Zoo! handles these themes with great playfulness, whereas both passing through/torn formations (1998) and What these ashes wanted confront them directly, without irony. passing through/torn formations took Hoffman to Europe in a search of the origins of his mother's family. If a sense of doubling occurred in ?O, Zoo! and in the very title of Kitchener-Berlin — in passing through it becomes schizophrenic, with his cousin Leesa's face split in the corner mirror that his uncle Wally uses to help settle his deranged mind.

And if death and dying is a presence in many of these works, it arrives unexpectedly at the end of Destroying Angel (1998), a film co-directed by Hoffman's friend Wayne Salazar that celebrates Salazar’s homosexual marriage in spite of his ongoing struggle with AIDS. Suddenly there is a phone call. A candle flickers out. Hoffman must hurry home because of the imminent death of Marian McMahon, his companion of many years who is ill with cancer. The full exploration of this relationship and its sudden loss become the poignant affirmation of What these ashes wanted. Hoffman has stated that his desire was “to illuminate the conditions of her death… the mystery of her life and the reason why, at the instant of her passage, I felt peace with her leaving… a feeling I no longer hold.” The catalogue for the Toronto Images Festival described the film as "What these ashes wanted is not a story of surviving death, but rather of living death through a heightening of the quotidian moments of everyday experience."

The complete works of Philip Hoffman incontestably establish him as an independent filmmaker of intricate artistic achievement and philosophical depth.

Film and video work includes

On the Pond, 1978 (director; co-cinematographer with Dan Swim)
Dogs Have Tales, 1979 (actor)
Freeze-up, 1979 (director; co-writer with Donny Fitzpatrick; cinematographer; editor)
Krieghoff, 1980 (cinematographer)
Megan Carey, 1981 (cinematographer)
The Road Ended at the Beach, 1983 (director; writer; cinematographer; editor; producer)
On Land Over Water, 1984 (co-cinematographer with Richard Kerr)
Prologue: Infinite Obscure (Narratives of Egypt series), 1984 (cinematographer)
Somewhere Between Jalostotitlan and Encarnacion, 1984 (director; producer)
Choral Fantasy, 1986 (cinematographer)
From Home, 1988 (co-cinematographer with Mike Hoolboom)
Svetlana, 1988 (co-cinematographer with Mike Hoolboom)
river, 1979-1989 (director)
Kitchener-Berlin, 1990 (director; producer)
Opening Series 1, 1992 (director; producer)
Opening Series 2, 1993 (director)
Technilogic Ordering, 1994 (director; editor; producer; TV)
Opening Series 3, 1995 (co-director with Gerry Shikatani)
Sweep, 1995 (co-director with Sami van Ingen)
Chimera, 1996 (director; producer)
Destroying Angel, 1998 (co-director, co-writer, co-cinematographer and co-editor with Wayne Salazar; producer)
Kokoro Is for Heart, 1999 (director; co-writer with Gerry Shikatani; cinematographer; editor)
Opening Series 4, 2000 (director)
What These Ashes Wanted, 2001 (director; cinematographer; editor; producer)