“Positiv unfolds with icons of childhood, doctors and old wrestling films; the simple act of telling seems to foster the accretion of memory.” (San Francisco International Festival Catalogue, 1999)

“Hoolboom sets the tone with Positiv; a monologue about AIDS told in four split-screens featuring pop-culture images, home movies and footage of visits to the doctor.” (New Festival Catalogue, NY, June 3-13, 1999)

“From the very beginning he calls for the audience's full attention, when on a split screen shots taken from Hollywood movies, video clips and home movies as well as the filmmaker himself can be seen and heard in his monologue on AIDS.” (Johannes C. Tritschler, epd Film 7/99)

"Having been diagnosed HIV positive, Hoolboom received a new impulse. The presence of the virus and its hiddenness evoke a chain of illusions and biological visions, new exercises in his film memory. The obsessive presence of sex/injury perseveres. However, it is no longer a shock of explicit nudity. Sexuality is an elegiac demonstration of incompatible, random beings. In the director's version, the film undergoes the same kind of transformation (decay: film, a body without organs), but the loop of eternal return provides the film with a true resurrection. The film is divided into six parts. The opening section (Positiv) is the director's collage of porn, popular scientific films, detailed footage of cells as well as sequences from classical films of big narratives. The picture is divided into four-one of them features the director and his soliloquy about AIDS that comments on bodies entangled in sex and death.” (Jihlava Documentary Festival Catalogue)

“Positiv, shows the filmmaker in a small enclosure, speaking about becoming a body and AIDS. Around him three accompanying screens fill with the manic refuse of the mediaverse, providing counterpoint and juxtaposition to the flow of language.” (Esma Moukhtar, Montevideo Catalogue)

"The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time... They are also in the ground of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream." (Don DeLillo)

A monologue about AIDS, rendered in split-screens generously furnished with images from Terminator 2, science flicks, Michael Jackson and home movies.