When one is unable to pay one’s bills, the electricity is cut. Once one can pay again, the digital appliances flash 88:88. While philosophical systems begin with the concept of nothing as a starting point for thinking, Isiah Medina’s film uses “88:88” as a marker of the nothing of poverty and the possibility of counting life anew. Medina’s film cuts together instances in the lives of friends and their experiences in love, science, art, and politics (the four conditions that make up the essence of Philosophy according to French theorist Alain Badiou, whose writings figure prominently into the film via textual recitations) in order to see their lives outside of narrative, and to show thinking is always both possible and necessary. This is a screening intended to celebrate the film’s 10 year anniversary. The director will be in attendance for a post-screening Q&A, on the occasion of his coming to Chicago to premiere his fifth feature, GANGSTERISM (2025), at the Onion City Experimental Film Festival. 

The film will be preceded by a frenetic array of short films—eleven of which will play out in a scant seven minutes—from Alexandre Galmard, Kelley Dong, and Isaac Goes, three filmmakers, friends, and frequent collaborators aligned with Isiah Medina’s production company, Quantity Cinema. These are lithe lashings of style—vaporous and damn-near smoked out forays into digital primitivism and video diary—that orbit the outermost edges of cinema. They will be presented chronologically and continuously. 

“His is instead a cinema of the cut, of difference, of reconsidering every assumption of more than a century’s worth of filmmaking. […] I could say that 88:88 is a masterpiece but masterpieces are a term of the past; Medina has taken his first step into the future.” Phil Coldiron, Cinema Scope Magazine

“I am astounded. We mathematicians or philosophers speak so much about multiplicities, overlapping, ramifications, etc. and it is just beautiful to see all the concepts at work, with admirable visual force. The cuts, continuities, off-voices, silences, the very real superpositions of multiplicities, produce a new opening of our minds and sensibilities.” – Fernando Zalamea, mathematician and philosopher, author of “Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics”