They Are What They Are
Circles and squares: two evenly distributed shapes order and arrange the nontraditional continuity of Isiah Medina’s , one of the director’s first new works to screen publically since (2015). The first of three shorts presented in the second edition of the Vancouver International Film Festival’s Future// Present section—a program devoted primarily to features by emerging independent Canadian filmmakers— is the program’s ideal work: a film thinking through formal questions and developing potential methodologies to answer them. For seven nearly silent minutes of dense, kaleidoscopic rhythms —at least one, two, or three associations ahead of our cognitive faculties at all times— is cut to similarities of shape and colour: from a woman doodling circles to a graphic of a spinning globe, from a blank, blue pushes images to their breaking point, spitting them out at a rate that our eyes can only process as incomplete impressions; the best we can hope for is to retroactively organize sequences based on form alone. Think of a far looser and much, much faster version of Hollis Frampton’s (1970) (with more assembly required), and you’ll begin to understand what you’re in for as Medina bids to the realist credo of his film’s title.
