One of the most rapturously acclaimed and hotly debated experimental films in recent years, Isiah Medina’s incendiary debut fearlessly pushes the aesthetic constraints of the cinematic medium by reengaging the nascent potential of its fundamental tools. A feature-length montage film in which untold hours of footage of the director’s family and friends is stitched into a panorama of fleeting images, sounds, and sensations, 88:88 refines the Canadian director’s early experiments with audio-visual disunity by expanding its coordinates beyond the confines of the impressionistic and into the realm of the purely visceral. As playful as it is provocative, the film confronts issues of poverty and racial injustice with a formal arsenal radical enough to reframe such matters as points of philosophical integrity as much as moral responsibility. Fresh off its premiere in Locarno and subsequent stops at the Toronto and New York film festivals, 88:88 arrives in Los Angeles for a pair of screenings sure to incite and inspire in equal measure.
~ Join us before and after each screening for complimentary refreshments.
This is unbridled filmmaking, resoundingly alive.
- Michael Sicinski, MUBI Notebook
88:88 represents an important moment in ennobling filmmaking’s philosophical potential, leaving so much in the dust.
- Adam Cook, Sight & Sound
A kaleidoscopic combination of self-portrait, documentary of Medina's local subculture and friends, and a radical attempt to create an actively thinking film, a film forming thought through the evolution of its imagery and cutting.
- Daniel Kasman, MUBI Notebook
Medina's is a cinema of the cut, of difference, of reconsidering every assumption of more than a half century's worth of filmmaking....I could say that 88:88 is a masterpiece, but masterpieces are the domain of the past; Medina has taken his first step into the future.
- Phil Coldiron, Cinema Scope
88:88 is as much a diary film as an essay film, as much about class as it is about its internalization—and, littered with fleeting vantages on everyday escape, glimmering distractions and paths acknowledged but untaken by Medina’s camera, a work of startling romanticism.
- Steve Macfarlane, The Brooklyn Rail
(Available to download after screening date)