Screening times:
Friday, March 6, 8:30 PM - director attending!
Isiah Medina | Canada | 2025 | 84m
As he mulls over the budget for his new film, director-gangster Clem sends his artist cronies after an old comrade rumoured to be a leaker. Featuring a cast of artists and filmmakers (including Fleapit favourite Kalil Haddad) Gangsterism finds Isiah Medina strikingly reimagining the gangster picture in this profound and ironic examination of both depiction, endorsement, and the morality of making and consuming cinema.
The film will be preceded by Medina’s six-minute masterpiece Semi-Auto Colours, in which kids from West End Winnipeg learn to count to one.
Echoing a sentiment shared by Kate in her introduction to Miryam Charles’ retrospective earlier this year, there is no one in the world making films like Isiah Medina. We are so excited to be joined by the filmmaker, along with Producer and regular collaborator Kelley Dong, in person for a Q&A following this special Atlantic Premiere screening of Gangsterism. Don’t miss out.
— Praise for Gangsterism—
“There are few filmmakers working today, who are more committed to the inordinate possibilities of the cut and the transformative power of montage than Isiah Medina.” - Daniel Turner, ICA
“Gangsterism innovates not only formally, with cuts that feel like sleight of hand and compositions that resemble stately paintings, but offers new dimensions. This film—which follows a director-gangster (because the one is so often the other) collecting overdue funds—is revealing in what it communicates about disillusionment, exhibition, propriety, and fascism in Toronto’s filmmaking landscape. It is truly impressive how the film manages to both absorb and organize our anxieties—not simply acknowledging how racism or genocide infects us as social beings, but how blatantly it limits our capacity to engage with art and culture, and this is by design.” - Saffron Maeve, Contours
“Medina's work remains abrasive in the best way in terms of demonstrating the possibility of thinking cinema differently, of doing cinema differently.” - Collin Brinkmann, Letterboxd
Isiah Medina currently lives in Toronto, where he directs and produces films with his company Quantity Cinema. His feature films include 88:88 (2015), Inventing the Future (2020), Night is Limpid (2022), He Thought He Died (2023), and Gangsterism (2025). His work has played at Locarno Film Festival, TIFF, New York Film Festival, Jeonju International Film Festival, and YouTube. He is most recently the subject of the retrospective “Beginning from Beginning Again: The Cinema of Isiah Medina” at ICA London. His article, “Cut is a Form of Thinking,” was published in the December 2025 issue of the political philosophy journal Crisis and Critique.
Tickets $12.65 ($12 at the door if available)
If you’re unable to pay the standard rate, send fleapit.cine@gmail.com an email and we’ll reserve a spot for PWYC on the day. Movies 4 everyone! - FPC
