LOADING
Directed by Isiah Medina | 84 minutes | 15+ | Australian Premiere |
5:15pm Saturday, 16 May | Balam Balam Place - Cinema 2 | Buy Tickets | Buy Passes
Cinema is floundering. Time to fix it.
As he mulls over the budget for his new film, director-gangster Clem (Mark Bacolcol) sends his artist cronies after an old comrade rumoured to be a leaker.
Filmmaking and cinema culture are in enormous flux, artistically and industrially. Acclaimed Toronto-based experimental filmmaker Isiah Medina’s Gangsterism confronts the violent intersections of art, commerce, race, and identity in the current moment with aggressive style. Much of this movie finds lovers, friends, colleagues, and (ugh) funding bodies trading cynical bon mots like bullets, but the disorienting shots and cuts constantly provoke questions about the how’s and whys of expression in a cruel world. The characters may be deadpan, but the form screams loud. And there’s a lot to scream about! Co-starring Kalil Haddad.
Screens with a pre-recorded interview with director Isiah Medina.
SIMILAR: Tout Va Bien, La Belle Noiseuse, Losing Ground (1982), The All Golden, Funeral Parade of Roses, the work of Kalil Haddad
“A film noir set in the seedy world of Canadian film grants and Spielberg apologists.” - Zach Lewis, InReview Online
“Medina's work remains abrasive in the best way in terms of demonstrating the possibility of thinking cinema differently, of doing cinema differently, of thinking & doing cinema in one's own specifically different way not in ignorance of what's come before but in artistic, political, and intellectual skepticism/defiance of the dominant paradigms that have held sway over this most free and radical (and beautiful) of mediums.” - Collin Brinkmann, Letterboxd
CONTENT WARNING: Discussions of suicide, flashing lights
Country: Canada
Year: 2025
Language: English