"Philip Hoffman's ?O,ZOO! (THE MAKING OF A FICTION FILM) uses a diary format to skirt along the edge of someone else's filmed narrative (Peter Greenaway's A Zed & Two Noughts), and to trace the anatomy of pure image-making. 'Pure' is both the right and the wrong word: Hoffman is a man addicted to the hermetic thisness of filmed images, and plagued by the suspicion that these images, far from being pure, are really scabs torn away from the sores of the world. Found footage shot by his grandfather (a newsreel cameraman) is the starting point for Hoffman's meditations on the illusion of visual purity, and on the distance between the 'neutral' image and the value-laden narrative that it can be made to serve. It is a moral distance, one that this filmmaker surveys with a wary fascination." - Robert Everett-Green

"... Hoffman rewrites the Canadian documentary tradition into a family memory and romance." - Blaine Allan