He Thought He Died is the sly, perspicacious fourth feature by Isiah Medina (88:88, TIFF ’15), in which the filmmaker continues to further carve out his own uniquely independent space in the Canadian film scene. Shot in Montreal, Toronto, and Kingston, Ontario — featuring the latter’s Agnes Etherington Art Centre as one of the central locations — the fragmentary fiction stars co-producer and co-cinematographer Kelley Dong as a filmmaker conducting research in a museum vault, while an unnamed painter (Medina) plots a heist to steal back his work from the same space. Throughout, the narrative is interwoven with sequences probing the central questions of art, aesthetics, ideological structures, and commerce, here given form in philosophical exchanges, observational passages of artistic creation, exuberant bursts of music, and more. An impressive contribution to an increasingly rich corpus — one marked by an economy of form and collective portraiture as resistance — the film is avowedly political in its examination of voice and repudiation of institutional barriers, while featuring some of the most elegant, enchanting moments of Medina’s career.

ANDRÉA PICARD

Official Selection, 2023 Toronto International Film Festival

Content advisory: strobing/strobing effects