A filmmaker of memory and association, Hoffman creates highly ‘personal’ yet universal works, which weave fiction and documentary in an experimental ‘diarist’ cinema. He has screened his work in England, Holland, Australia, Estonia, Germany, Belgium, Italy, France and the USA. In 1987, ?O,Zoo! (The Making of a Fiction Film) received a Genie Nomination (in the Documentary Category), and First Prize in the Experimental Film Category at the Athens International Film Festival. In 1991, the Sydney International Film Festival in Australia honored Hoffman with a retrospective of his work. In 1994, Technilogic Ordering received jury citations at the Toronto International Film Festival and the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Chimera (1996) won a 1st Prize at Athens Film Festival, and Destroying Angel (1998) has won three awards at festivals in the USA. Kokoro is for Heart (1999) is Hoffman’s 15th film.
 
In 2001 Hoffman was featured at the Images Festival for Independent Film and Video. What these ashes wanted (2001) premiered at the festival and received the Telefilm Canada Award. As well, at the festival a book about his work was launched: Landscape with Shipwreck: First Person Cinema and the Films of Philip Hoffman contains over twenty-five essays/writings by academics and artists. He has also received a 2002 Golden Gate Award, New Visions, from the San Francisco International Film Festival, as well as the Gus Van Sant Award from the Ann Arbor Film Festival for What these ashes wanted.

“Philip Hoffman has long been recognized as Canada’s pre-eminent diary filmmaker. For over twenty years he has been straining history through personal fictions, using the material of his life to deconstruct the Griersonian legacy of documentary practice. As an artist working directly upon the material of film, Hoffman is keenly attuned to the shape of seeing, foregrounding the image and its creation as well as the manufacture of point of view. Hoffman’s films are deeply troubled in their remembrances; he dusts off the family archive to examine how estrangement fuels a fascination with the familiar surroundings of home.

Mortality forms the absent centre of Philip Hoffman’s oeuvre, a body of films that seems to foreshadow a penultimate loss that will take the maker to the outer and inner reaches of grief. Through the repeating figure of death—whether a boy lying on a Mexican roadside in Somewhere Between…, the death of an elephant at the Rotterdam Zoo, in ?O,Zoo!, or his uncle’s legacy of insanity and death in passing through/torn formations–Hoffman approaches the limits of representation and the ethical burdens of vision and reproduction.” (Karyn Sandlos, Toronto Images Festival, 2001)
 

 
“The films of Philip Hoffman have revived the travelogue, long the preserve of tourism officials anxious to convert geography into currency. Hoffman’s passages are too deeply felt, too troubled in their remembrance, and too radical in their rethinking of the Canadian documentary tradition to quicken the pulse of an audience given to starlight. He has moved from his first college-produced short, On The Pond—set between the filmmakers familial home and his new found residency at college—to a trek across Canada (The Road Ended at the Beach); from Holland, where he was invited to the set of Peter Greenaway’s A Zed and Two Noughts and made ?O,Zoo! (The Making of a Fiction Film) to Mexico for his haiku-inspired short Somewhere Between Jalostotitlan and Encarnacion; from passing through/torn formations pan-continental dialogue of madness and memory to Kitchener-Berlin’s oceanic traversal; and finally, to river, a landscape meditation that leads inevitably home. Denoting the family as source and stage of inspiration, Hoffman’s gracious archeology is haunted by death, the absent centre in much of his practice, a meditation on mortality and its representation. His restless navigations are invariably followed by months of tortuous editing as history is strained through its own image, recalling Derrida’s dictum that everything begins with reproduction. Hoffman’s delicately enacted shapings of his own past is at once poetry, pastiche, and proclamation, a resounding affirmation of all that is well with independent film today.” (Mike Hoolboom, Inside the Pleasure Dome: Fringe Film in Canada, 2001)
 

 
“Canada’s leading diary film-maker, Hoffman has been playing the personal off against the public in his materialist documentary reinventions for over twenty years. Family business and the oppositional impulse of mortality (the deep driver of all image work of course) are primary motors in an oeuvre, formally innovative but grounded in the real, that is little known in the UK, yet widely acclaimed by the likes of Brakhage and Michael Hoolboom. ‘ (Gareth Evans, Time Out, London UK 2002)
 

“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. (Canadian Film Encyclopedia, Peter Harcourt)