Semi-Auto Colours*, Isiah Medina, 2010, 6'10 min
88:88, Isiah Medina, 2015, 65'05 min
Idizwadidiz, Isiah Medina, 2016, 7'20 min
Inventing the Future (Trailer), Isiah Medina, 2019, TBC

*New 4K scan of 16mm work print

We're pleased invite Toronto-based experimental filmmaker Isiah Medina to present a rare screening of his work, followed by a Q&A.

"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