The Brooklyn Rail

Early on in Gangsterism (2025), Isiah Medina’s fifth feature, Clem (a stand-in for the director, played by Marc Bacolcol) testily recounts a disagreement—one of many in this discursive flick: “I said, ‘As an artist, I just make films for other artists,’ and Jon was shocked! He said, ‘At a certain budget, you have to make it for the audience.’” His friend, Nico (Jonalyn Aguilar), more inclined to side with Jon, offers the bromide, “Well, cinema is also an industry,” and Clem, flummoxed, asks why she would say “industry” instead of “language.” This debate delimits the film’s central rift.

The tension between the articulation of craft and the protocol of commerce is one that every filmmaker must navigate, and Medina, whose films seem to answer to no one, does so with exceptional integrity. Suffice it to say, “industry” means something very different in Canada, where public funding reigns supreme (Gangsterism was backed by a government grant) but, in Medina’s shrewdly obstreperous hands, so does “language.”

From the 2010 short film Semi-Auto Colours, made when he was just eighteen, and his debut feature 88:88 (2015), to more than a decade’s worth of impassioned and principled experimentation, the Winnipeg-born filmmaker has provoked walkouts the world over by marching to the beat of his own chaotic drum. “Be proud to know, regardless of race, most people don’t like your work,” Clem is told, and, though Medina is a valued fixture in Canada’s avant-garde, the words have a pang of truth to them. His dense, prickly films—peopled with ciphers, mouthpieces, dialecticians, and strawmen—have been called elitist, onanist, and even inhuman. In Gangsterism, his most unshakably human work to date, the director doubles down with flair and lucidity.

In Clem, Medina imagines himself as both filmmaker and gangster, hunting down the pesky squealer who’s been leaking his films online while rounding up outstanding debts to fund his next picture. This conflation of cineaste and kingpin—parallel vocations historically pursued by mavericks and buccaneers—provides a generic Trojan horse for Medina’s formal, philosophical, and ideological insights. Given the director’s longstanding refusal of narrative schemata, that horse might as well be made of glass. Transparency, though, can offer a different sort of beauty, and Gangsterism is a sight to behold.

The film opens as Clem gradually emerges from an aquatic dream. A literal pillow shot is frenetically intercut with Great Lake vistas, pixelated images of windswept downpour, and a pile of crumpled celluloid. “Either live broke or on your knees with money—I felt so rich of world when I had no budget,” Clem’s voice repeatedly echoes as he drifts awake next to his confidant Ez (Kalil Haddad). A beach-side stroll bleeds into scenes of quasi-domestic intimacy between the two men, whose expressions of mutual affection and trust establish the film’s loose strands of plot, while also grounding the long stretches of giddy abstraction and loamy, poeticized talk that follow.

The plot kicks off in earnest with a pitch meeting; the scene appears in chiaroscuro as Clem and Ez stand together under a spotlight. They defend their project against narrow-minded critiques. An especially stern, old-fashioned challenger takes Clem to task for his renegade critical stance on Westerns, and tells him to read up on writers like Tag Gallagher and Shiguéhiko Hasumi to get a “better perspective”—Ez retorts that Hasumi exalted the type of film where the hero brags about stacking Koreans five feet high and using them as sandbags. Such genocidal inclinations, their opponent asserts, “are the building blocks of cinema, and you need to know them.” The first half of his statement may be true, but the second lays bare how such rhetoric can be used to insulate personal preference and reinforce a colonial canon.

Despite what you’d expect, neither of Clem’s objectors are white, nor are most of the characters who antagonize him throughout the film—one of its throughlines being the frequent gaps in solidarity between people of color navigating a racist and colonial practice. Yet pockets of unity abound nonetheless; in one of countless quotable bon mots, Clem declares to a sympathetic peer, “I used to say ‘never compare me to a living white,’ but I don’t want the dead either.” That Medina’s films pay homage to those of the late Jean-Luc Godard is old news (a poster for In Praise of Love lurks in Clem’s office), and his double invokes the French iconoclast explicitly in one of the film’s most devastating exchanges: “I can’t speak Tagalog because my parents didn’t think it would be economically viable—that’s goodbye to language for me.”

The film is also concerned with the myriad ways such histories of violence are reflected in present-day atrocities, and how we receive them as images mediated by the sinister agendas of industry. “I don’t want to get used to livestreaming genocide,” says fellow filmmaker March (Charlotte Zhang), who’s also shown directing a scene of spectacularized violence: a blindfolded man clutching a film canister is slaughtered with wooden Tommy guns as a press photographer documents the scene before also getting killed. Soon after, a series of cuts collocate palm trees, an issue of the Hollywood Reporter, a Toronto International Film Festival lanyard, and the Israeli flag.

If Gangsterism, like the rest of Medina’s work, can sometimes feel like an endurance test—replete with repetitions and motifs, with little firm narrative ground to stand on—this is usually a result of the director’s tendency to stuff his loosely sketched scenarios full to the bursting (the film’s 84 minutes carry the conceptual and experiential weight of a two-hour runtime). Obsessed with the ways that cinema can variously mobilize and anaesthetize, Medina’s style is in constant confrontation with the politics of form, erratically juggling constellations of symbols and subjects that frequently spark against each other. He chases digressive viewpoints as far as they’ll take him, and the sum of this collision of vantages is almost always an expanded, capacious point of view—a shout that transforms with every echo.

It is uniquely difficult to do his work justice with the written word. The density and velocity of his cuts render ekphrasis futile; his clarity and self-awareness preempt analysis, threatening would-be critics with redundancy. Reviews of his films usually sound impatient and closed-minded, evoking the infamous New York Times Magazine piece that likens avant-garde filmmaking to “cultural vegetables.” Though Medina is adamant that cinema is not a linguistic artform (he is correct), it’s important to note that he is also a writer. While lesser artists often insulate their work from criticism in a shrill, defensive manner, Medina comes by such rebuttals honestly, by nature of thinking, at least in part, like a critic himself. Many of the broadsides aimed at Clem and his real-world counterpart are biased or blinkered, but some are valid as well; Medina addresses both dissenting factions, humbly and humorously implying that all he can really do is stick to his guns.

His assuredness and introspection also succeed because, beneath all the abrasive flourish and high-minded intellect, he’s a romantic. Consider the image, proffered by March, that cinema is always a mass art form even when there’s only one person in the theater. One of Medina’s most beautiful constructions, in fact, is his essay “Moviegoing,” which I was lucky enough to watch him recite at Crit Salon, a quarterly reading hosted by critic and curator Saffron Maeve in Toronto. Medina writes: “Two lovers are like cinema, two frames produced by the cut of encountering each other, and the two framed perspectives have to go on cutting the world, each cut presenting the present, transforming the frames cut by cut, again and again, where nothing is given, the world re-enchanted, recounted.” As he rattled off his open-hearted, stream-of-consciousness prose, he let page after page drop to the floor from his shaking hands, culminating in a heap of papers—a hypnotic motion that, with the spell of his words, bewitched the room. It came as no surprise when I learned that his next project will be a romantic comedy.

“There is no plot; you are loved,” insists Ez, mid-embrace during the film’s final stretch—a polysemy that, taken literally, consolidates many of the film’s pleas for community and collective action which, crucially, remain unresolved. Though feelings of uncertainty course through much of Gangsterism, a story where forms of betrayal (personal, political, financial) hover constantly over our big-hearted desperado’s head, the film eventually locates a strange serenity.

Like many great avant-garde works, Gangsterism’s tendencies toward repetition and protraction are ultimately restorative, wearing down any semblance of catharsis or expectation to extract something purer, somewhere between thought and feeling. On first viewing of the final passage, I felt drained, lost. But on second, I felt somehow hopeful, even energized. Perhaps because the film's repeating images of cosmic combustion felt more like a reset—the last thing we see is a title card reading, “INTERMISSION.”