Critics reviews

It's a challenging movie: polyphonic, polypictorial, but not confrontational, in fact pretty chilled-out; if it were featured on Top Gear the hosts might praise its speed, dynamic facility, and stability of suspension... I had a hard time with the film, but like any complicated work revisitations in whole and in part yield stronger comprehension; accordingly, new insights rise to the surface.

The images to me have a beautiful natural flow—I don't see them as jarring or stuttery—and the soundtrack, like in a lot of films, at least initially seems like an afterthought. I think that obviously this is the sort of film that we are invited to re-watch/re-listen to.

As a means of cinematically rendering the poor outside of "cry of the fishmongers" condescension or reductive melodrama,88:88 is fascinating. But it's truly worth watching for its boundless sense of enthusiasm, its heart-on-sleeve desire to capture the essence of everything on film, be it a still life of a sunbeam perfectly striking the indent of a pillow on which a head recently slept, or one of Medina's friends as they alternate between rhetorical and conversational dialogues.

Like any live raw experiment, it fails as much as it succeeds, falling into the petty egoism of youth, repetitive gestures, wanting too much too fast. But this is not a criticism against the film... Like punk rock, this documentary is engaged in the fundamentally rebellious act of rejection of preformatted images to see out a path of expression which would more correspond to an inner existence rarely captured or portrayed, and in that attains its contemporaneity, becomes a part of the Zeitgeist.

From its opening frames, Isiah Medina's first feature 88:88announces itself as a torrential carousel of images and sounds, with one seemingly independent from the next even as they teeter along the same line of questioning... Medina uses a variety of camera technologies to interrogate a specific situation of young adulthood that nonetheless consumes the viewer in its visceral flashes of intimacy.

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.

The rigorously cut-up and layered imagery, which resembles late-period Godard in its collisions of vivid color and natural light, is matched to a soundtrack pulsing with snatches of words and phrases and verses which fall in and out and across the mix in a dizzying reflection of media overload... Medina's radical admixture of the experimental and experiential has yielded a unique work, one unbound to tradition and with very few contemporaries.

Isiah Medina uses precision to attack the screen with a barrage of images and ideas. If you have ever been in an argument, or a moment of panic, and desperately wished that you had more than one mouth, because you needed to say two or more things at the same time (saying them in sequence would inevitably lend devastating weight to whichever came first), you can begin to grasp the explosive yet meticulous audiovisual headspace of 88:88.

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.

88:88 is a real experiment, which means that its failures, or what appear to be its failures, themselves produce thought; chief among these are its occasional lapses into inscrutability, the result of creating rhythms which are too dense and too fast for any viewer to process in real time. But this "failure," tied to our accepted notions of "reading" moving-image work, nonetheless points squarely to the film's great and generous demand: to begin every cinematic relation from degree zero.

The style of 88:88 has been compared to Jean-Luc Godard, specifically his recent projects like Film Socialisme (2010) and Adieu au langage (2014). What sets this film apart from Godard is an intimacy approaching a breach of privacy... The intimacy is real — the film feels like it is ripped from their lives, borne from their frustration and sadness. But beyond that, there is so much beauty as well.

I found much of the thought of this film impenetrable on first viewing, and 88:88 certainly does the audience no favors with hand-holding... But the film is nevertheless an incredible breath of fresh air for North American cinema; along with Khalik Allah's Field Niggas, it is a raw work that seems to be disregarding the vast majority of the norms of conventional and experimental cinema in America and Canada.