Doors: 6:30PM
Screening: 7:00PM
Tickets £6 // Cons £4.50
Dong, Kelley (2017), Rained Last Night (1min);
Dong, Kelley (2017), Late Embryo (1min);
Dong, Kelley (2019), shooting star summer solstice (15secs);
Galmard, Alexandre (2018), Eden is a Cave (15min);
Battais, Angelina (2019), Nanterre Personne (Do Not Bury Anyone) (9min);
Dong, Kelley (2017), Breaking and Entering (1min);
Medina, Isiah (2015), 88:88 (85min).
Total run time: 100mins.
Alexandre Galmard:
Eden is a Cave: I made it beautiful with the multitude of its branches, and all the trees which were in the garden were jealous of it. They see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall. They will say: "this desolate land has become like a garden; and the waste, ruined cities are fortified and inhabited.
Kelley Dong:
Late Embryo: 300 frames of 56 photographs taken over 20 days compressed into the span of the time it takes for you to answer my call as I pull up into the driveway and wait by the phone.
Rained Last Night: Router lights and a neighbour's window. Thinking about how much I hate rain.
Breaking and Entering: The impossible childhood home, it cannot be reached and it is not the same.
Shooting Star Summer Solstice: Alexander von Humboldt climbs a volcano. A parade comes to town.
Angelina Battais:
Nanterre Personne (Do Not Bury Anyone): Across a new fidelity, localised in Nanterre in the apartment of a family issued from Portuguese migration whose relatives are confronted with a logic of identity. An interpersonal and generational space is interlaced with an exteriority of the scene. Their visions succeeding, the alienation, of crossed fragments and those, hors-champs, of new points of decision.
Isiah Medina:
88:88: "If there's a trajectory to be found in Isiah Medina's films, it's not one of say, a movement towards abstraction, but rather a logical and methodical evolution. Perhaps one can construct a narrative in Semi-Auto Colors, less so 88:88, and by Idizwadidiz we are only thinking about the relationship between shapes, colors and space – so much to the point that even what we traditionally recognize as a screen is now malleable. These films are never wholly abstract, nor are they telling a story – rather, they give us a vision of the cinema stripped from its 20th Century limitations: Medina is one of the first filmmakers to truly explore what "film" making really is. It is a cinema of ideas, logic and communication – there is no story, only montage. It is not about depicting the exact points from which cinema need divest of its earlier influences, but the opposite – they are not examples, they are proofs. If these films are not narrative films, it is because of the realization that narrative is unnecessary towards realizing cinema's communicative potentialities, and if they are not abstract, it is because they are too logical. These are modern motion pictures – no stories, but yet trajectories, ideas and singular meaning." – Neil Bahadur.
The elusive, elliptical 88:88 is a bold debut feature from Winnipeg-based experimental filmmaker Isiah Medina that audaciously rethinks the possibilities and language of cinematic form. Being selected for both the Locarno Film Festival and TIFF’s most immaculately curated section, Wavelengths – two of the most consistently forward-looking festival programmes – can only mean good things, and the indication is clear: a powerful and original new voice has been discovered. The film’s narrative strands aren’t easily deciphered. 88:88 doesn’t have characters so much as late Godardian figures that, in monologue and dialogue, contribute to what feels at times like a collective diary entry in poetry. A couple in their bedroom, friends at a basketball court, people hanging out, struggling, telling stories, joking, living – what registers is a sense of life being lived and yet not bound to the confines of a film, extending beyond it.
Shot on the Red camera, 16mm and cameraphones, Medina fluently balances pristine digital images with pixilated frames and myriad overlays, again partly evoking late Godard. But it’s unfair to rest on any crutch of comparison here, as we’re treading in very new territory. Hip-hop is infused into the formal DNA of the movie as much as anything, setting its rapid tempo. The title refers to the reset digits of an alarm clock as they appear after the power’s been cut off, an allusion to the poverty the film philosophically investigates as a mode of being. On the other hand the ‘8’ is also a symbol that suggests infinity. Medina chops up temporality until it feels completely suspended, hitting at the same time the pause button and fast-forward on life, thinking around and inside it. 88:88 is a journal of filmed thought that seems to form in the instant you watch it and contemplate along with it. You may not keep up with it, but the emotions are palpable even when the ideas are intangible. To watch the film is to experience a milieu, an abstract plunge into Winnipeg’s young underclass.
Like watching water after you toss stones into a river, 88:88 is a rippling reaction to what seems like a million ideas firing at once. Medina’s figures (friends, one would assume) are actively coping and working towards understanding, just as the film aims to do. Medina’s poetic eye finds things in unlike things, transforming realist spaces and surfaces into something else, a texture of impressions that speak to existence. To describe 88:88 is to necessarily talk around it, as it purposely transcends words (while also using them as a tool, but one with limitations). Considered in its seemingly infinite scope (and in only 65 minutes) are issues of love, ethics, technology, race, politics and class – and none feel separate from the others. These are exciting, personally charged images concerned with solving real problems on a micro level and pondering their implications on a macro level, aiming to do what all the best films do: to break down the barriers between each other, and between thinking and feeling. It represents an important moment in ennobling filmmaking’s philosophical potential, leaving so much in the dust. With the arrival of 88:88, the cinema has a lot of catching up to do with Isiah Medina.