:: FRIDAY, APRIL 10 - THURSDAY, APRIL 16 ::

🧅 ONION CITY EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL

All screenings at Chicago Filmmakers unless otherwise noted

Competition Program #1: Ecstatic Devotions
Friday, 6pm
In documenting sunrises over the course of the year—and in collaboration with painter Huh Yunhee, who’s shown at work amid the film’s ethereal images of the surrounding landscape—Jonathan Seungjoon Lee’s PRACTICE TOWARD LIGHT (2025, 13 min) sequesters light in a way that makes it feel almost outside of time. The quiet ritual of witnessing dawn becomes less about duration than about accumulation. Through multiple exposures on 16mm film, Lee creates a layered visual field in which horizons overlap and dissolve into one another, compressing time and space into a single, luminous plane, an effect both meditative and uncanny. Gabi Rudin’s ALL OF THIS MUST BE PAID FOR (2025, 13 min) embodies—perhaps too perfectly—the program’s theme of “movements of a spiritual spiral.” What begins with the clinical specificity of a pelvic exam, introduced through stark red text overlay that recurs throughout, gradually expands into a broader meditation on the body and its relationship to pain, memory, and control. Rudin’s approach is essayistic, weaving together image and text in a way that resists linear progression in favor of accumulation and return. The cited sources that appear at the film’s conclusion underscore this intellectual framework, lending the work a layered quality, even as its subject remains deeply intimate. In Matt Whitman’s NEARER TO THEE IN A TRIPTYCH (2025, 9 min), a Lynchian sensibility emerges through its stark, haunted imagery and its attention to the residue of lives once lived. Described as a devotional triptych, in which belongings left behind by deceased family members inhabit a barren domestic space, the film grounds its unease in absence rather than presence. The pacing and compositional rigor heighten this effect, allowing each image to linger just long enough to become unsettling. Finally, Charlotte Pryce’s THE GLOAMING (2025, 14 min), described as “a metaphorical tale of pyrophytic transmutation, of metamorphosis through fire… inspired by medieval paintings of celestial portents,” unfolds with a kind of rapturous intensity. Pryce’s use of 16mm and Super 8 film, alongside magic lantern slides, situates the work within a lineage of pre-cinematic and early cinematic image-making practices, lending it a tactile, almost alchemical quality. Fire becomes both subject and method, a force of destruction that is also generative, transforming landscapes and bodies alike. The film’s romanticism is not passive but elemental, rooted in cycles of burning and renewal that echo the broader thematic concerns of the program. Also screening but not available for preview due to its singularly tactile nature is Joshua Gen Solondz’s XTENDED RELEASE (2026, 16 min). Per the description, it’s a “handmade sculptural collage film on 16mm, collaged with tape, ink, skin, semen, and various corrosive chemicals.” [Kat Sachs]
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Competition Program #2: Invisible Cities
Saturday, 12pm
The containment of space is at the heart of this program. Anahid Yahjian’s DOMESTIC DEMON (2026, 6 min) centers on “matrescence and post-partum depression” during the pandemic. In an extended section, there’s clever shadow play in which the shadow person is shown doing things both normal and not; it feels almost primal, evoking the aforementioned matrescence in the wry savagery. Its other images are hauntingly beautiful, fractured but still resonant. The claustrophobia of the titular demon’s circumstances aren’t so much seen as felt. One might say Ben Balcom has made invisible cities—insofar as this suggests the radical communities that undergird polite society—a continued focus of his work. THE PHALANX (2025, 14 min) was shot on the former site of Ceresco, also known as the Wisconsin Phalanx, an agrarian commune in Ripon, Wisconsin, that was active between 1844 and 1849. Over the fey images of the location, letters sent by members of the phalanx are read, revealing both the group’s ideals and eventual disillusionment with the concept of living “in association.” Performers move around feeble dwellings, ghostlike in their anonymity and singularity, arousing the uncanniness of individualism. Lilli Carré’s work is always pleasurable in its creativity; in EVACUATIONS (2025, 7 min), colorful cel-animated smear frames inhabit empty public spaces, manifesting in such ways as a car on a roller coaster or people in an auditorium. The effect of the smearing has a Francis Bacon-esque quality to it, at once aesthetically pleasing but also suggesting a kind of wraithlike spectral conspicuousness. In Drew Durepos and Isaac Brooks’ FRESH VALUES (2025, 12 min), a neighborhood food co-op whose sales have been impacted by the pandemic and peoples’ desire to have their groceries delivered uses augmented reality technology to make the workers invisible. What begins as a novelty soon becomes something of a retail nightmare, exhibiting the human propensity to exploit technology for all its worst possible outcomes. The contained space that is the co-op becomes this exact hypothesis. Magdalena Bermudez’s HIDING PLACES (2026, 13 min) is quiet and meditative, pulling from the real-life Women's Reserve Camouflage Corps, a group of women artists during World War I who designed camouflage techniques for the military. Our protagonist, vocally silent but whose words appear as text across the screen, seems to be one of them; when the project ends, she soon discovers her true self. A post-apocalyptical landscape in the Brazilian countryside is the ostensible setting for Ciro Araujo’s I HEAR A CITY (2026, 15 min), an almost noirish speculation. It explores the depopulation of the space through a fictional archive that uses materials ranging from newspaper articles to a discovered film reel. Araujo’s film thus becomes this imaginary city, a monument of its creation and destruction via their imagination. It nevertheless feels impressively lived-in, warm and inviting even as the uncanny premise unnerves. Rooted in a natural space yet ultimately assuming a fantastical nature, Coleman Stewart’s THE JOY OF COOKING (2024, 9 min) is evocatively simple. For most of its duration, a person hits tennis balls into a cave alongside the Ohio River. It seems as if this may go on for its entirety until seemingly magical things begin happening in what’s described as a “memory cave.” Its opacity is both calming and evocative. The possibility of space has never seemed so large as in this expansive program. [Kat Sachs]
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Competition Program #3: Afterimage
Saturday, 2pm
Afterimage features films from Guatemala, Canada, France, Austria, and the US that have been grouped together by their deeply personal collection of images that journal a lived experience. In Lua Borges’ GUARITY (2025, 3 min), images of booths—guard houses—are shown in rapid succession. In different places strewn about São Paulo, these tiny shacks once employing security officers are now mostly unused and forgotten. Quick in-camera editing provides movement in Borges’ travelogue focusing on structures that remain permanent in an ever-changing landscape of surveillance. Michael Alexander Morris’ PALIMPSEST ONE: NOW U SEE US (2025, 4 min) juxtaposes analogue filming in 8mm with the subject of 3D printing while only editing in-camera. The printer begins building a lament configuration that reveals itself to be the likeness of a Pharaoh. Scaffolding is removed and what remains is the statue of a god; a totem of worship made entirely of plastic. Brittany Gravely’s MIST (2025, 4 min), captured in black and white, makes perfect use of light and shadow. Mist sweeps through the woods, blocking out parts of the frame while sunlight pierces through. In other moments, the sun rains down from above. A family wanders the park. Overlapping images create a disturbing effect as stress free Tai Chi in the grass distorts into a communal mourning of the fog that has rolled through. Reading the logline after screening solidified the feelings evoked by the images: A phenomenon captured in the park, days after the death of a friend. WRIGHTFILM (2024, 90 sec) by Chicago-based projectionist Ben Creech, is a travelogue of quick in-camera edits during a visit to three distinct homes designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Endlessly rewatchable as the variation in shot length feels indebted to Wright’s Organic Architecture style. In MY GRANDMA STILL CLEANS MY UNCLE’S ROOM (2026, 6 min), Alex Guerra records a conversation with his uncle that dives into memories of childhood homes and the fears he faced while immigrating to the US. In 2015, Guerra’s uncle was detained and forced into a facility. Uncle’s vulnerability draws you in while the corresponding images fight for your attention. In FJORD TIME (2025, 5 min), directors Jonathan Johnson and Carleen Maur provide a diary of a summertime lakeside vacation filled with Earth tones, light dancing on the water, and a cabin with a grass roof against amusement park rides. The meditation and thrills we seek when away from home. Kate Solar’s (FOR ONCE I DREAMED OF YOU) (2025, 6 min) is a contrast filled poem that slowly descends into a nightmare. Wheat fields, weeds, and flowers illuminated by truck headlights in the dark, slow-motion walking, scratches on 16mm, overlayed images, and fingerprints on the film itself build to a cacophony of manipulated celluloid. Jules Bourbon’s CÂINE PIERDUT (2025, 17 min) follows a silhouetted figure as they wander the streets picking up loose scraps of paper, bringing them home, digitizing them, and following the strands of data he’s found. Textures and staccato editing emphasize the poet figure’s loneliness as he narrates his quest for connection. Billy Roisz’s THE GARDEN OF ELECTRIC DELIGHTS (2025, 12 min) begins with Bosch-inspired surrealist imagery, with an overlapping deep dreaming process that creates a hypnotic explosion of fidelity and grain that fades to tones of grey, pink, and blue. Evoking a Jeremy Blake video art aesthetic, Roisz separates the film into four distinct movements. Using synth sounds and digital tones synchronized with alternating colors, the images band and warp hiding something underneath. Glitches slowly reveal the serenity of nature buried below. In Ben Russell’s latest film ANOTHER EARTH (2025, 12 min), actress Leslie Auguste reads an amalgam of excerpts from Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner and On Beauty by Zadie Smith, which is then repeated through various cycles of the film. Each cycle overlaps the one before. A black and white close up of Auguste's mouth and nose while chanting, "time is not what it is, but how it is felt," is overlapped by an exploration of caves with expressive blues, reds, and shades of purple. As the narration repeats, expressing concern for an impending apocalypse, Russell includes doom scrolling algorithmic reels online that reflect a society that while on the brink of collapse will need trendy leggings. [Shaun Huhn]
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Beyond Resolution: Short Films by Sabine Gruffat
Saturday, 6pm
The artist and filmmaker Sabine Gruffat excels in the field of experimental documentary, employing imaginative cinematic techniques to defamiliarize real-life subject matter. This collection of short works showcases the more abstract side of Gruffat’s practice; three of the selections bask in nonrepresentational imagery, while the others operate on an abstract level to some degree. The program begins with the short that’s perhaps the most straightforward. With DISCLAIMER (2025, 5 min), Gruffat presents, all in the same white font against the same black background, various statements that have appeared at the beginning or end of movies and TV shows. Some are generic, like the standard disclaimer stating that what we have just watched is a work of fiction, while others are more specific, like the one from Anthony Mann’s STRATEGIC AIR COMMAND (1955) thanking the US Armed Forces for their participation in the production. The work gets dark pretty quickly; there are a surprising number allusions to historical atrocities. In all, this makes for a fitting introduction to the program, as it asks viewers to consider how films function as political or legal entities. HEADLINES: BOMB PARTS (2007, 3 min), which follows, strikes a balance between Gruffat’s abstract and political tendencies. Here, the artist animates text from a New York Times article about explosives being found in Baghdad, with the reporting giving way to a hypnotic sprawl of words. It’s not a bad metaphor for the miasma of information that pervades so much of 21st-century life. Moving forward, the program alternates between abstraction and reporting. A RETURN TO THE REASON TO REASON (2014, 3 min) is a manipulation of Man Ray’s 1923 film LE RETOUR À LA RAISON that creates gorgeous textures from the combination of old film artifacts and digital intervention. BRAVE NEW WORLD (2015, 7 min) finds Gruffat manipulating old film again, this time documentary footage shot by some of Henry Ford’s employees on land that the famous antisemite bought in the Amazon rainforest for a rubber plantation. Gruffat edits the footage rapidly, dizzyingly, and she focuses on brutal imagery to highlight the exploitation at the heart of Ford’s project. In one passage, the film alternates between shots of a snake and an anteater, as if prompting the viewer to wonder when the former will engulf the latter. Ugly history also raises its head in TAKE IT DOWN (2019, 13 min), which confronts the controversy surrounding the continued existence of monuments to Confederate military personnel. Of all the works in the program, this is most characteristic of Gruffat’s longer documentary work. This features brief profiles of people who defend the monuments—and even dress up like Confederate soldiers to celebrate them—as well as protestors who demand that the monuments be removed; it also features, per the artist, “solarized film [that] makes positives bleed into negatives.” The title makes it clear whose side Gruffat is on, but she makes her point cinematically too, using special effects to make Confederate monuments seem to disappear from old photographs. Before TAKE IT DOWN in the program is BLACK OVAL WHITE (2009, 3 min), which uses electronic oscillators and feedback to manipulate the video recording of a computer-generated abstract animation. Watching it, you may enjoy trying to discern where the digital snow stops and the animated figures begin. FRAMELINES (2017, 10 min) operates on a similar wavelength. Gruffat describes this piece as “an abstract scratch film made by laser etching abstract patterns on the film emulsion of negative and positive 35mm film. The strips of film were then re-photographed on top of each other as photograms, then contact printed.” The last two selections, MOVING OR BEING MOVED (2021, 11 min) and SOUVENIR STATUETTE (2024, 13 min), incorporate digital animation to reflect the uncanny nature of the contemporary world. In the first, computer-generated voices deliver speeches about performance theory while CG avatars perform awkward motions. The film also contains a sales pitch from “the world’s first digital employee” and an actual person performing house work in a motion capture suit, both of which raise questions about the nature of labor in an increasingly automated society. SOUVENIR STATUETTE considers the eponymous object through speeches delivered by more CG avatars and shots of computer-animated reconstructions of actual souvenirs. The question raised by this work might be, If souvenirs can be generated without reference to real things, do they really commemorate anything? It’s the final provocation in a program that’s full of them, and this speaks to Gruffat’s considerable talent. [Ben Sachs]
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Competition Program #5: Late Night With Tycoon
Saturday, 8pm
Here is a can't-miss beer & shot combo of a screening for any Onion City attendees, and one that is far more rarified than either the late night billing or my prior analogy would lead you to believe. Keng U Lao's 掩眼法 DIRTY EYE (2025, 13 min), a low fantasy dalliance with the casinos of Macau, kicks off the affair. The story relayed is that of a high-rolling young gambler and the cosmic secret that a wealthy King once relinquished to a landfill, but it plays out almost entirely in the margins of a street-view travelogue in which narrative happenings are illustrated by mosaics of playing cards affixed to the windows of moving commuter buses—like a tarot card intervention on capitalist enterprise, or perhaps the other way around, come to think of it. The only feature film on this year's competition slate constitutes the remainder of the screening. Charlotte Zhang's TYCOON (2026, 89 min), a minor sensation at Rotterdam this year, is the director's ferocious feature-length debut; it is a free-radical feat of independent filmmaking that evokes no shortage of inspired aesthetic touchpoints but feels beholden to none of them. In the stretches where narrative scaffolding is provided—negative space and free association increasingly prevail as the film drifts along—we learn that it is the year 2028, livestock viruses have resulted in widespread meat shortages, and a monolithic corporation upholds a monopoly on the sale of genetically modified food-grade cockroaches. On a possibly unrelated note, the city of Los Angeles is teeming with roaches as it prepares to host the Summer Olympics. The film follows two young men (Miguel Padilla-Juarez and Jon Lawrence Reyes) as they commit a series of petty crimes against this backdrop of interminable rot and total enshittification. They steal palates of cockroach protein, boost cars, and deliver a biblical beatdown to a hapless food delivery robot, but all of their misdemeanors are dialectically placed in contrast with the strain of gangster capitalism that has historically propelled wealth accumulation and economic displacement across Los Angeles. As one of the two men puts it, "I'm only ever finishing last, but at least I'm doing it at the center of the world." This is an outrageously quotable movie, and I have to restrain myself from merely rattling off more flawless one-liners for the duration of this blurb. I can't help but think of Tsai Ming-Liang's THE HOLE (1998) in reference to TYCOON's homespun depiction of a shambolic near-apocalypse (and fascination with roaches), and the film's material instability—it was alternately shot on iPhone, Super 8, and Mini DV and frequently erupts into flurries of xeroxed photomontage—betrays unmistakable topnotes of INLAND EMPIRE (2006) with a visual strategy that serves to deglamorize the city and détourne any impulse towards Hollywood objectification. However, a late-film needle drop of Dinah Washington's "This Bitter Earth" proves to be a revelatory sleight of hand on Zhang's part, revealing Charles Burnett's KILLER OF SHEEP (1978) to be the operative ur-text. Here is an unselfconsciously scrappy debut, pieced together from a protracted nights and weekends shooting schedule, that is wholly collaborative, coolly and unrepentently singular, and suffused with grace that extends holistically from its nuanced characterizations and keen attunement to history all the way down to its modest means of production. Charlotte Zhang in attendance for a post-screening Q&A with Tone Glow programmer Joshua Minsoo Kim. [David Whitehouse]
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Competition Program #6: Structural Collapse
Sunday, 12pm
This program opens on a note of dry whimsy with Lillian Canright's A IS FOR APPLE (2025, 8 min), an enchanting bit of semantic gamesmanship that evokes the music of The Books at the band's most linguistically playful, or alternatively the absurd language 101 shenanigans of Ionesco's The Bald Soprano. Three short words, "apple, tree, bark", are looped, clipped, and rotated around one another until seemingly every permutation and emergent shard of meaning has been evinced. An unexpected appearance from a modern classic of internet cinema is next in the lineup courtesy of Nick Vyssotsky, whose COBWEBS SPUN BACK & FORTH IN THE SKY (2021, 18 min) is an apocalyptic compendium of mobile game ads, war footage, and fetish content culled from the filmmaker's saved videos on social media. The film is styled as a tongue-in-cheek revision of KOYAANISQATSI (1982), marrying a wide angle snapshot of the state of humanity in the 21st century to a portrait of the artist as a subject of the algorithm, but the film feels more like a remake of Herzog's LESSONS OF DARKNESS (1992)—all alien landscapes and human extremity—retrained on the doomscroll. In ACETONE REALITY (2025, 13 min), directors Michael Bell-Smith and Sara Magenheimer place two computer-generated voices in an insane-making dialogue about the powerful solvent properties of acetone (it can dissolve anything!) that I can only liken to this iconic Andy Daly routine. The outer limits of meaning-making are probed as a lattice of found footage, animation, and smudgy pixel painting slowly coalesces into "an insane, yet validated reality" per the Video Data Bank. With MY STRUCTURALIST FILM (2026, 6 min), Angelo Madsen takes the viewer on an outrageous journey into the filmmaker's own interiority that I dare not spoil. CHEW THIS! (2025, 2 min) is a hot pink nightmare from director Delphyne Panther-Brutzkus. Ostensibly inspired by Yoko Ono's iconic Cut Piece, it burns two brisk minutes of lo-fi, bubblegum flicker hypnosis in a weirdly affecting meditation on femme bodies. Karl Kaisel's EXQUISITE CORPSE (2026, 8 min) applies the logic of the famous surrealist creative exercise to the arrival of an invasive species in a new land. Focusing on a single preserved mud crab found far from home in the Baltic Sea, the piece flattens its strange journey into a dense collage of scientific inquiry, educational correspondence, and sci-fi evocations of the crab's unwilling participation in global environmental collapse. A downright demonic work follows in the form of Elijah Valter's RIDETHROUGH (2025, 11 min), which contorts footage from an amusement park into a hellish miasma of lurid artifacting, the likes of which I never thought one could be subjected to in a theatrical context. The footage is disfigured beyond belief—clearly sampled, resampled and layered endlessly in post—until the degradation is so severe, it miraculously begins to approach through sheer digital ingenuity the celluloid abuses inflicted across Phil Solomon's Psalms. 受难日 FALLEN DAY (2025, 9 min) reverses course with a lovely and low-key meditation on the sensation of falling from director Xiaolu Wang, who trains her camera on three minor vignettes: a dragon dance, an aikido class, and an evening spent ice skating. Jonah Primiano's STRUCTURAL CHANGES (2025, 2 min) is a brisk Bolex essay film that examines a few choice façades around the CalArts campus, engineering a juxtaposition between a worker touching up paint and a room where the administration are tucked away, proposing various “structural changes” for the university. One has to imagine these can only constitute drastic cuts in this barbaric time of total arts austerity. The program concludes with Zazie Ray-Trapido's LANGUAGE DECAY (2025, 3 min), which places a broken camera in the room with the filmmaker's grandmother. Her native tongue is spoken with uncertain proficiency, subtitles are intentionally omitted, and the encounter becomes one with unfamiliar selves and the slow erosion of time. [David Whitehouse]
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Competition Program #7: Blue, Blue
Sunday, 2pm
Almost all the works that I previewed in this program were elegiac in some way, whether they were reflecting on dead individuals, relationships, or ways of life. The only exception was the first selection, Kylie Walters’ downright swoon-worthy HEAVEN AND EARTH (2025, 4 min). Shot on 16mm in the woods of New England, this brief, quickly edited work (named after a Louise Glück poem) is scored to what sounds like a toddler babbling. The combination of sounds and images suggests a person’s first impressions of nature—there’s a wondrous sense of innocence here. Jumping much further ahead in the life cycle, Matthew Berka’s AFTERSONG (2023, 10 min) is the work in the program most explicitly concerned with death and dying. In it, Quentin Crisp reads bits of an obscure 1883 text about the soul and whether it lives on after the death of the body, with the author deciding that it ultimately doesn’t matter to him; to have experienced life will have been enough. Berka alternates the recitation with a compelling montage that features lots of natural imagery as well as microscopic studies of cell biopsies, which reinforces the idea that death is simply part of life and shouldn’t be feared. Robert Orlowski and Martha Orlowski’s N/A (NOT AVAILABLE) (2022, 5 min) briefly considers how films can function as a sort of life after death. Robert asks his grandmother Martha how she would like to be remembered by his grandchildren, suggesting that this work will preserve a bit of her identity into the future. The title refers to Martha not wanting to be photographed; the film consists of shots of her hands, the windows of the room where she’s sitting, the doilies on the dining room table, and so on. Lin Chen’s A LIGHT INTO THE VOID (2026, 14 min) continues in a similar thematic vein, as it incorporates old video recordings to memorialize the filmmaker’s father, who died in 2007. In the mix of vacation shots, Chen shares via onscreen text memories of father and a recent dream she had in which her dad visited her. This is a poignant work in the diaristic mode. Next, the program takes a historical/political turn with Belinda Kazeem-Kamińiski’s NURSERY RHYMES. (HOLY) WATER (2025, 4 min), which considers the forced baptisms of three Sudanese girls in South Tyrol in the 1850s, albeit obliquely. Kazeem-Kamińiski doesn’t re-enact the event, but rather has three Black girls, then three Black women, stand in front of a blue backdrop on a mostly empty stage and enact a game. The layered soundtrack incorporates whispering, clapping, and what sounds like a projector. Alan Medina’s TO SUMMON A SEER (2025, 8 min) is a soothing reverie on Mexico City at night and a mystic at work. Medina’s shots of the city are deliberately blurry, recasting the place into a collection of fuzzy lights, while the discussion of the mystic on the soundtrack is compellingly strange. It sets the stage nicely for the penultimate work on the program, Jesse McLean’s PLACEHOLDER (2026, 12 min), a wry yet tender portrait of a woman who withdraws into depression and alcoholism after her marriage breaks down. McLean’s narration, as usual, is clear and observant, and it goes well with the black-and-white imagery, which incorporates pictures from a book about Frank Hurley's 1914 expedition to Antarctica and handsome shots of the Swedish actor whom the film’s heroine becomes obsessed with. Both of these serve as foils to the heroine’s loneliness and despair, which McLean depicts without any sentimentality. As the artist writes, “escapism becomes a path back, a mirror revealing how far she's drifted from herself, and a space where she can begin to heal.” May escapism be so constructive for us all. [Ben Sachs]
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Competition Program #8: Mutable Records
Sunday, 4pm
The films of this program examine the results of human intervention in nature, highlighting its predominantly destructive results. There is also a focus on this shifting relationship over time and the human instinct of recording and archiving even the most devastating consequences, dissecting their own complicity. In GREEN GREY BLACK BROWN (2024, 12 min), Yuyan Wang presents a history of the exploitation of nature through images of oil and mud, a prehistoric world transformed by a desire for simulacra; the film features assembly lines creating fake plants, miniatures of forested neighborhoods, all objects which in their creation deplete the very resources they are trying to replicate. These images are soundtracked by distorted, haunting cover of “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” emphasizing the mournful processes. Oona Taper’s THE RABBIT ALWAYS DIES (2025, 9 min) is an animated piece, detailing the history of the rabbit and Hogben tests, which in the first half of the 20th century used human urine and animal dissection as accurate pregnancy tests. Taper acknowledges both the positive ways in which these tests advanced science and allowed women for more reproductive freedom while simultaneously causing ecological crises, globally spreading invasive species and extinctive fungal diseases. Sam Drake’s SUSPICIONS ABOUT THE HIDDEN REALITIES OF AIR (2025, 9 min) reveals a history of Cold War nuclear testing and radiation experiments, suggesting the insidiousness of their continual literal and figurative fallout. The final two films emphasize the human suffering that comes with these interventions. In Samy Benammar’s ADIEU UGARIT (2024, 16 min), Mohamed stands in nature, recalling how he witnessed his best friend shot by militia in Syria ten years earlier. Shot in black and white, and including both interviews and Mohamed’s poetry, the film juxtaposes the calming force of nature with the horror of human destruction. Finally, in Miranda Pennell’s MAN NUMBER 4 (2024, 10 min) a photograph posted to social media is scrutinized, with a narrator discussing the thought process of dissecting the image. At first quite pixelated, it is slowly revealed to be an image from occupied Gaza in December 2023. It’s the most powerful work in the program, as director Pennell illuminates questions surrounding the effect of visual culture, the stillness of photography to force one to look more closely, to examine. Noting the image was found on social media, MAN NUMBER 4 also questions the positioning of looking at a photograph from a distance, indicating that while there’s immediate effect in seeing these images, there is also a strikingly felt limitation in the action taken by those who witness suffering from afar. Also in the program but unavailable for preview are Lin Htet Aung’s A METAMORPHOSIS (2025, 17 min) and Harper Stone’s API (2025, 11 min). [Megan Fariello]
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Isiah Medina’s GANGSTERISM (Canada)
Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 7pm
GANGSTERISM, the latest knotty work of disorienting cinema from Isiah Medina, has got the future on its mind. The characters inhabiting Medina’s space constantly stress and bemoan the current state of cinema, the means of filmmaking production and distribution, and the ways in which 21st-century filmmaking must work to grow beyond the myopic limitations set by 20th-century standard bearers. The film is being labeled as an update on the “gangster film,” though this might be setting up an expectation that the film barely attempts to meet; there are certainly characters with shady agendas dressed in fashionable, well-fitting suits, but the verbiage on display is closer to Jean-Luc Godard than Al Capone, the stakes here are more intellectual than material, and while a few guns find their way onscreen, the violence throughout lies not in any weaponry, but the ferocity of Medina’s edits. His particular brand of intellectual montage, frames jabbing into each other at a disorienting pace, creates a cinema that moves at the rate of a rattled mind scrolling between thoughts, the image flickering and shifting in ways both alluring and alienating. This alienation is aided by a jarring sound design built upon looping music tracks, out-of-sync audio, and moments where it seems like sound has been rejected from the film altogether. While there is a slight attempt at narrative, with gangster-filmmaker Clem (Mark Bacolcol) distressing over his films being leaked without his consent, the core of the work lies in these philosophical dialogues between artists attempting to make sense of the political and economic trappings their filmmaking must navigate. Clem especially bemoans his place as a Filipino filmmaker, working to push against the dominant Western hegemony within film history (“I’ve seen enough bad movies from the canon to know white supremacy exists”) while trying to rise above the seemingly cliche standards set by other Filipino filmmakers (not even Lav Diaz is safe from catching a few strays here). Part of the delight of GANGSTERISM is letting Medina lull you into his particular rhythms and visual grammar, his work continually interrogating its own existence in content and in form. It’s a tad abrasive at first (I honestly had to watch the film twice before being able to get a grip on things), but watching these young artists actively grappling with the future of the art form with such force and craft is an adrenaline rush in itself. Even the very last word to appear on screen feels like a dare—a promise that Medina’s film is not a definitive endpoint to this particular discussion on cinema, but that there is so much more to explore and discover and create, a larger future to build upon together, just on the other side of the interval. (2025, 84 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Isiah Medina's 88:88 + Quantity Cinema (Canada/Experimental)

FACETS – Monday, 7pm

Isiah Medina and his compatriots under the Quantity Cinema banner have been at the cutting edge of film thought for about a decade now. Their distinctly 21st century work is concerned less with new technologies than with finding new conceptual approaches and ways of seeing through the tools we already have. Like those in the French New Wave, the artists of Quantity Cinema are also critics and theorists who have elucidated their ideas in writing and talks, treating their film work as a form of direct theory. FACETS’ screening of the group’s work, anchored by Medina’s modern classic 88:88 (2015), provides a good cross-section of the group’s work. Across the films, we see related conceptual angles that challenge our basic notions about film perception by de-prioritizing realtime experience of a film as the dominant viewing mode. None do this more severely than Kelley Dong, whose five works in the program are a collective 2 minutes and 18 seconds long. Their brevity gives them the quality more of digital paintings, since the viewer would be hard-pressed to have a linear-time understanding of the abstraction of the 1-second PEARS (2020), or the forms that might not register as such if they weren’t in the title of TWO DOGS (2022). There’s no warm-up or cool-down, and trying to mentally mark the beginnings and ends of the works seems to be part of Dong’s conceptual game. Alexandre Galmard’s work in the program similarly challenges perception, but in the realm of more conventional portraiture. Including multiple pieces with Medina as an onscreen subject, his works use longer image times and repetition to allow for more sustained engagement with different elements simultaneously. His 2019 work VIA D7 is a highlight of the program, and a perfect bite-sized distillation of the Quantity Cinema ethos. The film’s finite set of images (friends riding in a car, shot at odd angles and occasionally drowned out by flash) are put through a gauntlet of eye-training flicker edits that engage the viewer in the consistent act of both meaning-making and space-imagining. While you couldn’t call any of these pieces “hangout movies”, hangout material forms the basis of many of the works. The artists appear as subjects throughout each other’s films, and one gets the sense that even the most severe projects in the group grew organically from a desire to document loved ones. On the more blissful end of this spectrum is Isaac Goes’ WORLDS (2021), a quasi-travelogue that contains some of the most purely beautiful photography of the program, consistently tweaked for extra-vivid colors. On the other end of the spectrum is 88:88, created by Medina while he and his group of friends were largely unemployed, and which takes its title from the readout on appliance displays when they’re turned back on after having one’s power turned off. Relative to Goes’ outward, optimistic camera, Medina looks inward to times of inaction; the subjects are pictured sitting or standing around, talking or reading, sometimes onscreen but most often in layered voiceovers. The film’s images establish dynamics more than action, such that the subjects become generic forms, wayward youth stuck in doldrums despite the aesthetic invention happening on a higher layer of reality. There’s almost no diegetic speech, with most language residing in the soundtrack’s torrent of voices, sometimes monologuing, occasionally in conversation with one another, but most often reading from a variety of uncited philosophical and economic texts. When all of this slows down, we hear disarming talk from or about Nicky, a friend of the group having an especially hard time after losing his job, being evicted, and moving in with his mom. This arc feels key to Medina’s intervention in narrative film form: despite the work’s conceptual and alienating nature, there’s real dramatic tension in this push-and-pull between overwhelm and moments of clarity. The film’s many, many edits mirror this juxtaposition visually by turning relatively static images into chaos. It’s a lesson in how much you can do with an essentially still image, accelerating the teachings of the post-2000 Tony Scott School of Editing with forms that seem to vibrate into place through superimpositions and fine-tuned speed adjustments. A jarring style, to be sure, but Medina has made a roadmap for a contemporary materialist cinema in which new ways and new speeds perception are possible. It’s a gift that’s proven useful for his collaborators in their continued development of the style, and could prove invaluable for anyone with that shared desire to change collective vision. (2013-2022, Total approx. 91 min, Digital Projection) [Maxwell Courtright]

Alexandre Koberidze’s DRY LEAF (Georgia/Germany)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Sunday, 3pm

In an era of 4K, IMAX, and the absolute standardization of ultra-high-resolution images, there is perhaps no more willfully perverse act in visual media than shooting your three-hour movie in 240p. This is exactly what the adventurous Alexandre Koberidze did with his debut feature, LET THE SUMMER NEVER COME AGAIN (2017), and what he has done again with DRY LEAF. The director shot the movie himself on a 2008 Sony Ericcson phone camera, and there may be moments when the viewing experience conjures memories of watching early YouTube videos or heavily compressed digital files. Yet DRY LEAF is ultimately nothing like that, because Koberidze is deliberately turning technological deficiencies into aesthetic features. So instead of trying to mentally clear the noise by watching through the pixelated surface, we are made to look at it, to find in the pulsating fuzziness, jagged lines, and smeary colors an impressionistic beauty that defies photographic norms and prescribed standards of aesthetic value. The confounding of vision is the point here, and it resonates perfectly with a story about failed location and absent geographical information in which a man, Irakli, embarks across rural Georgia to find his missing daughter. As his very Kiarostami-esque road trip unfolds, Irakli encounters signs of loss: of landmarks and the memories tied to them, and of visual representation itself (on top of the diminished detail due to the low resolution, several characters are invisible and drolly appear in scenes as disembodied voices). But if DRY LEAF is in part about what’s lost to modernity, it’s even more about what can possibly be gained. By making us sit for three hours with images in a format so outmoded they now look alien, Koberidze aims to make us see anew. There is a palpable childlike wonder in the way his camera lingers over rustling leaves, flowing water, foggy mountainsides, and a plethora of animals; one can sense the filmmaker’s delight in discovering how different movements, shot scales, and qualities of light interact with the digital noise of 240p to create effects impossible to achieve in traditional cinematography. Alongside the twinkly and plaintive score from his brother Giorgi, he ends up transforming putative lack into mesmeric perceptual abundance. Screening as part of the New Releases and Restoration series. (2025, 186 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s SERPENT’S PATH and CHIME (Japan)

Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

Kiyoshi Kurosawa had made over twenty features between the release of THE SERPENT’S PATH (1998, 85 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) and CHIME (2024, 45 min, DCP Digital). The former, a jet-black comedy with maximalist brutality, depicts the kidnapping and torture of a man believed to be a child murderer. The latter is a quiet short film where Kurosawa unsettles his audience with his signature minimalism. CHIME opens on a cooking teacher who witnesses the suicide of one of his students. As he slowly begins to spiral downward, his actions escalate until reality slips entirely. With committed performances, the director locks the camera for most of the film, only panning when necessary. Outside of his classical, constricted visual language, Kurosawa employs a drone shot as our hero runs away from a body he has dumped in an unmarked location. The director has always depicted an uneasiness that lives just below everyday mundane life, making the audience feel as if the appalling remains just outside the edges of the frame or just around the corner. Over his past few films, Kurosawa has appeared interested in a critique of the modern male: isolated, self-centered and angry over unmet expectations. In their attempts to strive and compete, they are pushed to unspeakable actions. The sterility of CHIME juxtaposes the grindhouse quality to SERPENT'S PATH, a film that gets into the nitty-gritty logistics of torture, accented by engaging performances, leaving the viewer perturbed. Having recently remade SERPENT'S PATH, Kurosawa is one of the few working filmmakers who treats each work as its own pearl in a long filmography. Riffing on his previous work, he enters the halls tread most famously by Hitchcock. For a late period, he continues to find challenges for himself. As a master reaching new heights, the work continues to enthrall and entice his followers and new audiences. [Ray Ebarb]

Abbas Kiarostami’s HOMEWORK (Iran)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Wednesday, 7pm

“It’s not really a film, more a piece of research.” So says an off-screen Abbas Kiarostami, with characteristic modesty, to an unseen passerby while filming the scene of children walking to school that opens this delightful and deceptively simple documentary. While Kiarostami is widely regarded as one of the giants of narrative cinema in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, his prolific side-career as a documentarian is less well-known due to the vagaries of international film distribution. This 1989 feature, which grew out of and serves as a companion piece to the director’s 1987 breakthrough masterpiece WHERE IS THE FRIEND’S HOUSE?, is an ideal place for the uninitiated to start exploring his non-fiction work. The majority of the running time is devoted to direct-to-camera interviews with students from Tehran’s Shahid Masumi elementary school about the topic of homework; but the conversations between Kiarostami and his subjects gradually deepen so that the film eventually becomes an ethical inquiry into corporal punishment, poverty, illiteracy and the clash between tradition and modernity in post-revolutionary Iran. Kiarostami’s masterstroke here was to foreground the filmmaking process by occasionally cutting from close-ups of the children to “reverse angles” of the cinematographer who was filming them with a 16mm camera—and thus frequently reminding the viewer of exactly what these kids were seeing during the interviews. In a subtle but radical way, these “intrusive” shots invite us to empathize with the children, one of whom is terrified by the adult filmmaking team to the point of crying hysterically. That the film climaxes with an unexpectedly passionate recitation by this timid and reluctant interview subject is a testament to how Kiarostami was able to coax great performances out of children and non-actors alike. Preceded by Kiarostami's 1975 shorts TWO SOLUTIONS TO ONE PROBLEM (6 min, DCP Digital) and SO CAN I (5 min, DCP Digital). Screening as part of the Iran Through the Lens of Childhood series. (1989, 78 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Glover Smith]

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Genki Kawamura’s EXIT 8 (Japan)

AMC River East 21, AMC Dine-In Block 37, the Music Box Theatre and Regal City North – See venue websites for showtimes

Based on the 2023 walking simulation game The Exit 8 by Kotake Create, director Genki Kawamura's film adaptation preserves the minimalist premise and liminal horror while adding depth to its protagonist. The story follows The Lost Man, a commuter trapped in endless Japanese metro corridors who must spot anomalies to escape. Arnold van Gennep's Rites of Passage theory contains the first mention of a liminal space. He describes the rites as having three phases: separation, liminal, and incorporation. The liminal phase is the period between states. A liminal horror places audiences in transitional spaces like hallways and stairwells that exist only for movement between destinations. While exemplified by Kubrick in THE SHINING (1980) and as the Black Lodge in Twin Peaks, the concept wasn’t named until 2019 when “The Backrooms” Creepypasta went viral on 4chan. EXIT 8 uses liminality as both a psychological transition and architectural passageway. The Lost Man boards a train listening to Ravel's Bolero—the repetitive, building march subtly foreshadows the character’s future. When a passenger verbally assaults a woman for her crying baby, no one intervenes, including our protagonist. He then receives a call from a girlfriend he no longer sees, announcing her pregnancy. Overwhelmed, he suffers an asthma attack, becomes disoriented, and ends up at the starting line of a game that he’s not going to realize he's playing until five rounds in. When the dread sets in, Kawamura switches from POV long takes to reveal The Lost Man. The rules are deceptively simple: do not overlook any anomalies; if you find an anomaly, turn back immediately; if you do not find any anomalies, do not turn back; and go out from Exit 8. Now we play the game with him. It's a pattern recognition cognitive test—counting the posters on the walls, reading all the signs, checking that the lockers are empty, and noting the trash near the photobooth. We are immersed in this world. Cinematographer Keisuke Imamura’s POV work in the first ten minutes of the film showcases his talent, but his ability to make the same set of hallways interesting each time you see them is the real feat. There’s a museum poster with M.C. Escher's Möbius Strip II near the middle of the main hall, it’s magnetic inside the frame—the infinite eight, the grid pattern overlaid, and ants crawling in opposing directions for all time. The Lost Man is stuck within a Möbius loop, a purgatory of indecision. Along the way, he finds a six-year-old boy also inside the loop. Kawamura provides perspective shifts as chapters within the film to answer questions while also posing more. But any additional exposition we get is only given within the liminal space. Within these restrictive parameters Kawamura creates a breathing nightmare with raining blood, creatures crawling, tsunamis, and a “creepy middle-aged guy,” while also capturing fears associated with impending fatherhood. Nietzsche asked us to imagine life as an eternal recurrence with every moment repeated infinitely. EXIT 8 makes this literal: you could watch it forever. You'll never look at a subway corridor the same way again. (2025, 96 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]

Pier Paolo Pasolini's SALO, OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM (Italy/France)

FACETS – Friday, 6:45pm

Italy 1944-1945, the final days of Mussolini’s reign and the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom, function as the backdrops for SALO, but they only serve as settings and jumping-off points for something much more ethereal and sinister as one, far from any straight-forward adaptation or period-specific war based story. The film begins with the actions of four persons of power: the Duke, the President, the Bishop, and the Magistrate. Each of these libertines sign a written agreement that starts a series of sexually perverse atrocities, including murder, meant to serve their own amusement and stimulation. They begin with marrying each other’s daughters, right after having them humiliated by soldiers. Then they set out with the soldiers to the surrounding war torn island and begin abducting teenage boys and girls. Structured like Dante’s Inferno, stitched together by rules and laws, the four libertines can only carry out their behavior through their business-like staccatos, clinically and methodically, voting into motion each and every crime. Once they huddle their victims behind the doors of a magnificently large estate, there’s no hope of return. What follows is anything but pornographic, undermining the very expectations about what is erotic. David Cronenberg’s masterpiece, CRASH (also playing at the Siskel this week) and Claire Denis’ BASTARDS, share a similar attitude towards the notion of impotence requiring extreme means in which to stimulate release, resulting in near irreversible infections of the mind and body (Cronenberg’s VIDEODROME would also qualify). SALO is so hotly revered and reviled, that some have considered it to be the catalyst for it’s director’s demise. It premiered 3 weeks after Pier Paolo Pasolini had been murdered by a young prostitute, who later admitted he did not act alone, strongly suggesting his murder was politically motivated from within the Italian government. It wasn’t like Pasolini had never courted controversy with powerful figures before. To say nothing of all of his texts that sparked outrage from members of the left and right of his country’s politics, his first film ACCATONE, from 1961, caused a massive outcry amongst the government’s right wing. He was also a Marxist who made a film about Jesus, with 1964’s THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW. His 1968 film TEOREMA was banned for obscenity and caused the Pope to weigh in on its “blasphemy”. The 1970’s shocked audiences with his adaptations of THE DECAMERON, THE CANTERBURY TALES, and ARABIAN NIGHTS, representing a bygone past where Pasolini felt sex was still innocent and earthbound. Following this so-called “Trilogy of Life”, his next source of adaptation was the Marquis De Sade, a direct response to the previous three, who had inadvertently spawned an enormous amount of cheap porn during that decade, lifeless imitations intended to mimic the originals, entirely lacking in every conceivable way the qualities that made the originals so impactful and erotic. With SALO, sex isn’t the same anymore - it is no longer innocent or erotic. It is rancid and backwards but captured with a mystical amount of distancing, with possibly a little satirical humor coming through. It certainly wasn’t the subject matter, but during filming; Pasolini and his cast/crew would play football with the cast/crew of Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900, whose set was close to SALO’s. Most of the actors from the film claimed the shooting of the movie was a tender and jovial experience, and you can see it at times on the faces of the actor’s performances. Rather than it being an overlooked error, it adds a grounding element that is surely welcome and necessary. Nevertheless, humor in SALO is likely the last emotion one will experience. Pasolini dared to show un-filmable images, scenes never meant to be shown. In doing so, he reached the height of his cinematic style, achieving a sort of perfection. Formal beauty, a contrast conceived in Hell, lending the film the ability to become masterfully detached, a world completely outside of the horror; admittedly, this is probably the only way to be able to capture the film’s purpose and still allow it the ability to be seen. That isn’t to say anything is downplayed or immorally rendered. It is a testament to the director’s natural skill and moral intelligence to render the mechanisms of power in such infinite scope, from the past (Italy in the 1940s under Mussolini), the present (Italy during the 1970s), and the future - where the allegory will find its resonance with modern audiences. For Pasolini, it didn’t just stop at Nazi-fascism, it extended to all power, such as neocaptialism, or what he called “the New Fascism”, the advent of consumerism. Pasolini saw this specifically as the true cause of modern societal rot, making petty bourgeoisie out of society. Fascist iconography, despite being slightly visible at the beginning of the movie, is never present once the viewer and victims go inside the villa. When the four libertines gather their victims around in the “Orgy Room” to listen to stories meant to provoke sexual responses in the people listening, the positioning and attentiveness of bodies seems to resemble those watching and listening to a nearby TV, an invention Pasolini saw as a monstrosity of chaos. When the libertines are not abusing their victims, they retire to rooms decorated with art meant to resemble cubist artists like Léger, where they quote Rimbaud, Nietzsche, and Proust, while also discussing Dadaism; the commodification of ideas turned horrifically into objects used to serve other diseased interests, much like the bodies of the boys and girls outside the libertines’ private quarters. The malformed reification of human sexuality, contorted and twisted into shapes of frozen cruelty, render SALO an intense film, no question. It nearly sends people into fits of fear when faced with the opportunity to witness it. Its distance allows viewers the only way inside cinema’s most haunted house. The villa, initially displayed in all its natural splendor, is shown to be the most hair-raising sexual palace, where love is replaced with force, impotence, brutality, and the disposal of the body entirely; a spatial extension of nature at its most corrosive, rooms dripping with blood and excrement. Fantasies normally suited for sexual liberation, become metaphors for all-powerful repression, levels of depravity finding their natural reflection in the giants of political power, literally and figuratively. Mirrors play a very prominent role in SALO, serving as proof that these wielders of the “anarchy of power”, do indeed reflect on themselves, frequently even. All of this, flows to the rhythms and atmospheres of Ennio Morricone’s concrete-like score, often represented through the diegesis onscreen, such as a character on a piano, the outside droning of planes near the island’s estate, the falling of rain, or the whistling of characters awaiting their fates. Much like the music that opens over the credits, music also serves as a diversion for its characters, who find it easier to move to the music and discuss their girlfriends, suggesting that some of these people could actually return to normal life, completely unaltered. Yet the boys and girls who enter the villa, will either never leave (those who will not submit), or they will come out completely changed (those who submit); and still, some could choose to forget, which is the most haunting aspect of the movie. If you choose to observe what Pasolini captured with an amazing amount of actors on set at all times, a film of epic proportions conjured inside a demonic dreamworld, a “non-existence of history”, you will also be altered, but for the better. There’s a fine line between those who have seen the movie and pretend to have seen it. Viewers who honestly watch it from beginning to end, may find it a little harder to lend themselves over to any dismissive simplicities about the movie. Its complexity is fathomless, where both men and women, victims and abusers, can be equally guilty in the crimes on display and their proliferation. No one but those paying witness will know what has happened to the victims on the island of Salo, or even how long these crimes took place; or worse, care. This is now coming to you in an era where past “progressive” presidents/Congress have decided not to investigate war crimes in Iraq (to use the most infamous example), where former Chicago mayors pen articles for The Atlantic about people accepting responsibilities for their crimes (when they themselves personally oversaw the cover-ups of teens being murdered by police, along with the massive public school closings, and bonuses for top executives during the Wall Street bailout), and then, well, to say nothing of our current sitting president and his recent rallying cries for rounding up minorities into “camps” and going to war with Iran, there are mass genocides being carried out all over the world, in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Africa, the Sudan, and Myanmar. The allegories and bloody poetry of Pasolini’s film may signify our current reality, but actual representative reality, does not reign in the realm of SALO; this would’ve been too painful for Pasolini to create. He did not want to recreate the material world he disdained, far from the realities he had captured with his “Trilogy of Life” in the previous years. Pasolini had to go somewhere else to evoke the horrors of the present day. (1975, 117 min, DCP Digital) [John Dickson]
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Bigas Luna’s 1979 film CANICHE (90 min, Digital Projection) screens at 9:30pm, both as part of the Optical Noise series.

Brandon Daley’s $POSITIONS (US)

Music Box Theatre – Friday, 9:30pm

Line goes up. Line goes down. In a sea of personal and professional calamities, perpetual sad sack Mike Alvarado (a sneakily intense Michael Kunicki) can only focus on the line going up, or the line going down. The line here is the value of cryptocurrency that Mike has given his money, life, and very soul for; the very essence of his being seems to rest on whether the line goes up or goes down. It’s modern American life presented as eerily and plainly as possible, Mike’s bulging eyes forever glued to his phone screen, the mere concept of financial growth becoming an animating force that guides him through his own personal Hell on Earth. Writer-director Brandon Daley has created a family drama wrapped in a thriller wrapped in a nightmare, somewhere in conversation with the Safdie Brothers, Robert Altman, and Michael Mann, all frayed nerves and anxious energy and desperate souls grasping for stability in an actively unstable world. Mike’s devotion to his ever-shifting crypto-investments acts as a destabilizing agent between him and his developmentally disabled brother (Vinny Kress), his widowed father (Guido Z. Cameli), his distant girlfriend (Kaylyn Carter), and his newly sober, fresh-out-of-prison cousin Travis (Trevor Dawkins giving a live-wire performance that dominates the film). The horror of $POSITIONS lies in the continuously toxic ways that Mike stoops lower and lower to maintain the barest semblance of financial stability, trying to invest more in his faltering crypto-dreams, the horrific reverberations of his actions unfolding in ways more akin to a Greek tragedy than an American indie film. As stressful and chaotic as Daley’s feature gets, there’s something deeply upsetting in thinking about how many people around the world actually do invest their lives in such volatile economic markets. Mike’s story likely isn’t that far off from the millions of poverty-stricken citizens just waiting for that lucky break that will never come. The capitalist beast rages on, but as Mike soon discovers, taking that moment to breathe in, put down your phone, and look at the world around you can reveal things more beautiful and meaningful than any line on a screen. Cast and crew in attendance for a post-film Q&A. (2025, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Gregg Araki's NOWHERE (US)

FACETS – Saturday, 7pm

In 1992, B. Ruby Rich identified a movement in independent cinema that unapologetically explored queer identities and subverted traditional norms, coining it "New Queer Cinema." This wave of films challenged conventional storytelling by embracing experimental techniques and foregrounding marginalized voices. Drawing inspiration from the irony and camp of John Waters, these films critiqued mainstream notions of masculinity, femininity, and heterosexuality. Working outside of Hollywood gave these filmmakers the freedom to address controversial themes, echoing the rebellious spirit of pioneers like Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Derek Jarman. Key examples of this movement include Todd Haynes' POISON and Gus Van Sant's MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (both 1991), which set the stage for the radical style of Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy, which explores themes of youth alienation, queer identity, and rebellion, by mixing dark comedy, surrealism, and punk aesthetics via a transgressive journey.  In TOTALLY F**KED UP (1993), the first film of the trilogy, Araki finds his muse in the doe-eyed, sensitive, Keanu Reeves-esque James Duval. There is a rawness in its portrayal of queer youths navigating marginalization in Los Angeles. Set against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis, the film presents a nihilistic take on disaffected youth who reject authority and traditional values. Its fragmented, episodic narrative is reminiscent of a punk documentary, drawing parallels to THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION (1981). The film’s sense of nihilism, pervasive throughout the trilogy, underscores the characters’ disillusionment with societal norms. Araki’s next film, THE DOOM GENERATION (1995), delves into a hyper-stylized, violent world filled with absurdity and sexual tension. It is a road movie at its core, whose interludes in convenience stores and run-down motels showcase a collapse of society occurring around our trio of anti-heroes. Araki amplifies the violence from TOTALLY F**KED UP, to reinforce the idea that the world is a hostile and meaningless arena where hedonism is the only respite. The dystopia the characters navigate is filled with grotesque representations of fast food, television, and advertising. The film’s brutal ending symbolizes society’s punishment and rejection of marginalized individuals, particularly those who defy mainstream, heteronormative values. NOWHERE, the final film of the trilogy, features a sprawling cast and a more surreal, colorful aesthetic. The film is essential viewing for the production design alone, as each set and color scheme become more visually arresting than the last. While NOWHERE includes scenes of over-the-top teen suicide brought on by Moses Helper, a televangelist played by John Ritter, the overall messages contained within the film embrace the germ of hope found inside hopelessness. James Duval is Dark Smith, who struggles to maintain a monogamous relationship with his polyamorous girlfriend Mel (Rachel True). NOWHERE follows Dark over the course of a day as he searches for love and meaning amidst a surreal landscape of drugs, alien lizards, stylized sets, soap opera melodrama, and sexual fluidity. The cast includes a who’s who of '90s exaggerated teen archetypes and dastardly authority figures played by a bevy of then-famous and future-famous stars. Araki, by design, throws these characters at us in a rapid succession of mini tragicomedies occurring too quickly to care. As alien abductions, heroin use, and sexual assault happen in the world around Dark, his focus on finding someone who will never leave him pushes him forward through the hellscape. NOWHERE culminates as the perfect epilogue to Araki’s trilogy as the emptiness that infects the characters' lives eventually leads to an aimless and futile ending. The Teen Apocalypse Trilogy is a countercultural landmark in LGBTQ+ cinema. The films are raw, confrontational, and definitively queer. They depict their gay characters without coding their queerness or forcing them into tragic narratives or token roles. Though Araki neither celebrates or offers optimism to his characters for their sexuality, he infuses punk sensibilities, anarchy, and existentialism as a rebel yell for queer youth. This is exemplified best through Dark, as he learns the only way to face the meaninglessness in the world is to confront a cockroach alien while soaked in the blood of someone you care about and scream out in anguish. Screening as part of the Staff Picks series. (1997, 83 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]

Clint Eastwood's HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Tuesday, 6:45pm

The political odyssey of Clint Eastwood encompasses ideologies and idiosyncrasies so peculiar that they have yet to be named. In the 21st century, Eastwood has delivered a masterful and deeply sympathetic survey of minority-majority America in GRAN TORINO, implicated J. Edgar Hoover as a closet case whose private delusions left deep scars on free society, starred in an implicitly pro-Obama Super Bowl half-time spot directed by David Gordon Green, performed an explicitly pro-Romney duet with an empty chair at the Republican National Convention, directed a jingoistic pile of barely concealed kink called AMERICAN SNIPER, voiced ambivalence about the rise of Donald Trump while lamenting the political correctness imposed by the "pussy generation," and played a nonagenarian drug runner working for the Mexican cartels in THE MULE. Less a flip-flopper than a film personality with a downright Maoist penchant for self-criticism and deflection, the Eastwood oeuvre contains embarrassing multitudes. If you start out with the prostrate repentance of UNFORGIVEN, it might not be apparent just how extreme and violent Eastwood’s screen sins were. Take a fresh look at HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER, one of the most loutish and offensive films ever released by a major studio. Essentially a continuation of the sadistic adventures of the Leone/Eastwood Man With No Name, HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER envisions an American polity overrun with corpulence, whoring, hypocrisy, and general venality. Grafting a grinning, pro-rape grind house aesthetic onto big-studio classical filmmaking, HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER is a monstrous artifact from Spiro Agnew’s unconscious or perhaps a pre-Haneke experiment in audience torment. Is this a recommendation? No, definitely. (1973, 105 min, DCP Digital) [K.A. Westphal]

Jonathan Demme's SOMETHING WILD (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Saturday, 12:30pm and Wednesday, 2:45pm

One of the most free-spirited US films of the ‘80s, SOMETHING WILD begins as a sexed-up screwball comedy, blossoms into a road movie, and climaxes as a pretty terrifying crime film. Jonathan Demme directed it just two years after STOP MAKING SENSE, at what was arguably the peak of his career. E. Max Frye's screenplay, brilliantly twisty as it is, could have inspired a self-conscious genre exercise; but Demme brings it into the real world as much as he can. The film is rife with offbeat observations of blue-collar America, particularly in the small town high school reunion dance that serves as one of the movie's major pieces. It's also filled with insider portraits of U.S. hipster culture circa 1986, with cameos by John Waters, the Feelies (who play the house band at the high school reunion), and David Byrne's mother. What's so remarkable about Demme's achievement here is that he looks at both milieus with equal affection. "The movie gives you the feeling you sometimes get when you're driving across the country listening to a terrific new tape," wrote Pauline Kael in her ecstatic piece on the film, "and out in nowhere you pull in to a truck stop and the jukebox is playing the same song. Demme is in harmony with that America and its mix of cultures." She also wrote: "Demme has a true gift for informality. It shows in the simple efficiency with which he presents [his characters]; it shows even more in the offhandedness with which he fits in dozens of subsidiary characters... Demme somehow enables each of the small characters to emerge as a comic presence. I can't think of any other director who is so instinctively and democratically interested in everybody he shows you. Each time a new face appears, it's looked at with such absorption and delight that you almost think the movie will flit off and tell this person's story." (1986, 114 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Jackie Chan & Chi-Hwa Chen's POLICE STORY (Hong Kong)

Alamo Drafthouse – Thursday, 7pm

Though often compared to Buster Keaton for obvious reasons—some of Chan’s stunts are almost direct corollaries to those of Keaton’s films—Chan is also similar to Keaton in that he’s directed much of his own best work, having made POLICE STORY after working with James Glickenhaus on THE PROTECTOR (also 1985), which was intended but failed to launch Chan’s career in the United States. Ironically, POLICE STORY, which took Chan back to Hong Kong, premiered at the 1987 New York Film Festival, doing much more than THE PROTECTOR to grow his stateside reputation. In the film, he stars as a young police inspector, Chan Ka Kui, assigned to guard a crime lord’s secretary (Taiwanese icon Brigitte Lin) after she’s strong-armed into testifying against her former boss. The incomparable Maggie Cheung, whose comedic tenor rivals that of Chan’s own, also appears as his girlfriend. A Jackie Chan film often feels like skipping a stone across water, each plunk a show-stopping set piece separated by passages of anticipation; that is to say, the plot, while entertaining, is largely filler until the next conflict, which inevitably yields stunts as yet unimaginable to the average moviegoer. Chan eschews the slow-build in favor of immediate, heart-stopping action, destroying a whole shantytown in the first 15 minutes as ceaselessly as he destroys a luxury mall in the last 15 minutes. (1985, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Alejandro Jodorowsky's THE HOLY MOUNTAIN (Mexico)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Thursday, 9:30pm

Two sects of toads, garbed as Aztecs and Conquistadors, wage war across a model recreation of Tenochtitlan in a bloody and explosive show staged for a gathering crowd. This early scene in THE HOLY MOUNTAIN recalls another celebrated surrealist text, Antonin Artaud's theoretical Theatre of Cruelty, which similarly maps the infamous Mesoamerican massacre onto the destruction and rebirth of an artistic medium. Of course, Artaud's scope encompassed a radical overhaul of the stagnating state of theater, while the change Jodorowsky's film seeks to affect comes from within the viewer, but much in the spirit of The Theatre and its Double, THE HOLY MOUNTAIN strands the spectator as the very center of the objet d'art, and in a kind of out-of-body experience, immerses them wholly in the spectacle. Powered by meditation, LSD, and a bankroll from John and Yoko, the film tells the story of a humble thief, repeatedly depicted as a Christ-like figure, who one day ascends a tower and falls under the tutelage of the enigmatic alchemist residing therein. The allegory amps up as they acquire the assistance of the seven most powerful individuals under the sun, and together they embark on a journey to the titular sacred mountain. But all this is filtered through Jodorowsky's kaleidoscope, complete with disorienting aerial shots and eerily elegant mirror images, hallucination fuel for those not already under the influence. Screening as part of the Arthouse Vulgarity series. (1973, 114 min, DCP Digital) [Tristan Johnson]

Christian Petzold’s MIROIRS NO. 3 (Germany)

Alamo Drafthouse – See Venue website for showtimes

The inciting incident of Christian Petzold’s new film MIROIRS NO. 3 is a countryside car crash that claims a life but leaves the vehicle intact. The car is a cherry-red Chrysler Le Baron, while the corpse belongs to the charmless male companion of the accident’s survivor, a music student called Laura (Paula Beer), which in movies—like Otto Preminger’s 1944 noir—is the name of a dead woman whose memory is so powerful she returns to life. In her fourth collaboration with Petzold, Beer plays Laura as a lost spirit who finds her place only after an encounter with death in the home of a nearby woman, Betty (Barbara Auer), who teaches her to garden and introduces her to her grown son (Philip Froissant) and husband (Matthias Brandt). The appliances in the home are constantly malfunctioning, while the men operate what may or may not be a criminal enterprise from their auto shop, returning the settings of the cars they service to zero. Early on, Betty slips and calls Laura “Yelena”: the ghost whose clothes she now wears. Petzold, a product of the academically monikered Berlin School of directors, has long made films in accordance with Jacques Derrida’s concept of “hauntology”—contemporary stories of late capitalism that are suffused not only with a century of Germany’s political and economic transformation but of storytelling, reflecting old films and fables through the language of digital surfaces and drab, glassy architecture. An acclaimed run of arthouse success began in the 2010s with his melodramas BARBARA (2012), PHOENIX (2014), and TRANSIT (2018), capped with an overtly supernatural outing in UNDINE (2020). With the more grounded, contemporary story of a struggling writer in AFIRE (2023) Petzold signalled not only this new period of artistic transition but a preoccupation with the intrusive present, and the imposition of climate crisis on his storytelling—as if the future had reclaimed his work from the past. MIROIRS NO. 3 is another work of transition, depicting little of the textures of wartime, capital and catastrophe that have characterized his cinema to date. Its sparse plotting provides plentiful moments of droll humor, Laura accepting her stage-managed role in Betty’s family as a microcosm of transactional relations under the decaying economic order, a crumbling house whose inhabitants press on out of shared delusion or human ingenuity. The old Petzold surfaces late in Laura’s sabbatical with a needledrop allusion to midcentury American pop music, like the mournful use of Burt Bacharach in TOTER MANN (2001), a stirring passage which seems to draw the characters out of their morbid rituals and into something like unconscious, unaffected life. This invocation of a re-animating nostalgia—the past as a friendly ghost—is a new, contingent optimism for Petzold, a notion as enticing or troubling as the wafting curtain across a window left ajar. (2025, 86 min, DCP Digital) [Brendan Boyle]

Bi Gan's RESURRECTION (China/France/US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Saturday, 6pm

Bi Gan’s latest film unfolds as a cosmology disguised as cinema. In its world, humanity has discovered the secret to eternal life: stop dreaming. A person who no longer dreams becomes like a candle that does not burn. It can exist forever, but it produces no light, no heat, no risk. Within this brutal logic, dreaming becomes sabotage. Those who persist are branded “Deliriants,” figures whose dreams introduce pain and instability into reality. Cinema, Bi Gan suggests, is the oldest and most dangerous Deliriant of all. RESURRECTION opens inside a movie theater, with cinema confronting its own origin. Film stock burns as the audience recoils. An intertitle announces the governing law: immortality requires the abolition of dreams. Yet cinema survives precisely because it refuses this command. It retreats into opium dens, nested dollhouses, silent-era distortions, and German Expressionist sets. The assassin assigned to eliminate Deliriants can see through illusion, yet must adopt the gentlest of forms to destroy them. This contradiction structures the film. Each chapter inhabits a distinct cinematic mode, less homage than lived environment. At the center is a nameless Deliriant whose world appears as a tinted silent film. He eats flowers and would rather die than stop dreaming. When the assassin brings him home, she discovers an empty projector cavity in his back and threads it with film. When the projector runs, they are transported into a field. Cinema quite literally animates him. A poet before he was a filmmaker, Bi Gan has always treated cinema as a tool for excavating memory rather than advancing plot. From KAILI BLUES to LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, he dissolves past, present, and future into a single perceptual state through long takes, nonprofessional actors, and Buddhist philosophy. RESURRECTION extends this project outward. Cinema itself becomes both subject and setting, staging a century of film history as a dream that has begun to forget why it once mattered. THE ARRIVAL OF A TRAIN (1896) mutates into film noir, complete with an unsolved murder, false accusations, and a suitcase serving as a MacGuffin. Jagged shadows stripe alleyways like jailhouse bars before a hall-of-mirrors shootout closes the chapter. The relay continues through winter wastelands, monasteries, and apocalyptic cities. Across time, the Deliriant appears as monk, con artist, and lover, facing detectives, deities, thieves, and vampires. Each episode marks a cinematic era and a philosophical shift. In the monastery, bitterness becomes a literal spirit summoned after a tooth is pulled. In the con-artist chapter, supernatural power reveals itself as performance: timing, gesture, confidence. Bi Gan also punctures his own seriousness when needed. One episode asks a riddle: what can never be recovered once lost? After prolonged insistence, the answer lands. A fart. The film’s most ambitious chapter is a monumental long take set on New Year’s Eve, 1999, cinema’s collective nervous breakdown. Biker gangs roam as the camera glides through docks, alleys, stairwells, and karaoke clubs without blinking in the rain. When a character addresses the camera directly, it responds. It has a name. Cinema becomes sentient, implicated, unable to feign neutrality. By dawn, as lovers race for the 7am boat, RESURRECTION has compressed cinema’s history into lived duration. Two hours pass for the assassin. A hundred years pass for the Deliriant. Cinema ages differently than people. It accumulates suffering, desire, and memory at a higher speed. It dies young and ancient at once. RESURRECTION argues that cinema persists not because it grants immortality, but because it insists on burning anyway. Immortality without art is just another name for death. Screening as part of the New Releases and Restorations series. (2025, 160 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]

John Carpenter's ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (US)

Music Box Theatre – Friday, Midnight

High concept and low class, John Carpenter's 1981 sci-fi/action film premises itself on a paranoid endgame scenario: what if crime just keeps going up? Carpenter settles on the conservative trajectory of 400 percent and cedes Manhattan to the most violent criminals, turning it into an island prison and letting it go to ruin. Only the most hardened offenders are sentenced there—new prisoners are given the option of cremation before arrival—making it a particularly bad place for the President (Donald Pleasance) to crash land. Charged with fishing him out within 22 hours, the police commissioner (Lee Van Cleef) offers a full pardon to incoming convict 'Snake' Plissken (Kurt Russell), a former Special Forces operative-turned-criminal—but only if he can successfully recover the President. ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK is a wild ride that is at times clever and at other times surprisingly dull. Most interesting is not the search-and-rescue but the creative depiction of a ruined New York and its ad hoc city-life, circumscribed by extreme danger. An old acquaintance, Cabbie (Ernest Borgnine), watches an all-convict Broadway production before making his way uptown with Molotov cocktails at the ready. Shot mostly in darkness, Carpenter succeeds in creating a closed-off atmosphere that is both somehow dingy and futuristic. These touches, along with several solid performances, breathe life into the rote barrel fire-pocked landscape, and Snake himself. Screening as part of the Prison Break: Films of Escape series. (1981, 99 min, DCP Digital) [Brian Welesko]

Noah Baumbach's FRANCES HA (US)

The Davis Theater – Tuesday, 7pm

The most financially and critically successful of the mumblecore films, FRANCES HA is also Noah Baumbach at his finest and firmly pushed the genre into the wider public eye. Heavily influenced by Woody Allen films (ANNIE HALL and MANHATTAN) as well as the French New Wave, Baumbach's magnum opus showcases the straightforward side to filmmaking and demonstrates how a strong director can make one hell of a film from a simple screenplay. The script is full of sharp, candid dialogue that feels honest and natural. This character study relies heavily on the emotional and disenfranchised power that conversation has in daily life. Greta Gerwig plays the titular Frances, a 27-year old dancer whose life is crumbling around her with no end in sight. Like a drummer behind the punchline of a joke, Frances is often a beat late in her conversations, her finances, and most importantly, her livelihood. Gerwig's performance serves an apt metaphor for the millennial generation and the obstacles that they face. It's refreshing to see a film provide an authentic look at how a character's life isn't always going to work out in that special, feel-good way. Despite all this, FRANCES HA is inspiring for its views on the influence of personal growth and the highly personal definition of success that exists when people finally find their own little slice of heaven. Frances just wants to find happiness, and it's fascinating to watch her take that intimate journey towards it. Screening as part of the Big Screen Classics series. (2013, 86 min, DCP Digital) [Kyle Cubr]

📽️ ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Alamo Drafthouse
Terry Zwigoff’s 2001 film GHOST WORLD (111 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday at 9:45pm and Monday at 10pm.

Sam Peckinpah’s 1972 film THE GETAWAY (128 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday at 3:30pm.

Nick Toti and Rachel Kempf’s 2024 film IT DOESN’T GET ANY BETTER THAN THIS (84 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 7:15pm, and Ching Siu-tung’s 197 film A CHINESE GHOST STORY screens Tuesday, 9:30pm, both as part of the Terror Tuesday series.

Josh Heaps’ 2025 film CITY WIDE FEVER (74 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday, 9:30pm, as part of the Weird Wednesday series. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Alliance Francaise de Chicago
Leyla Bouzid’s 2015 film AS I OPEN MY EYES (102 min, Digital Projection) screens Tuesday, 6:30pm. Doors open at 6pm for a complimentary glass of wine. More info here.

⚫ Asian Pop-Up Cinema
The 20th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema continues, with screenings throughout the week. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Block Cinema (at Northwestern University)
Mario Martone’s 2025 film FUORI (117 min, Digital Projection) screens Friday at 6pm. The screening, presented in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago, will be introduced by Massimiliano Luca Delfino, Associate Professor of Instruction, Northwestern University, Department of French and Italian. More info here.

⚫ Chicago Film Archives 
“A Celebration,” a new video artwork at 150 Media Stream created by experimental filmmaker Colin Mason, will showcase images from home movies in Chicago Film Archives collections. 150 Media Stream is a large-scale digital art installation spanning a 150-foot LED wall in downtown Chicago curated by Yuge Zhou. In the lobby of 150 N. Riverside Plaza; enter through the Randolph Street entrance. More info here.

⚫ Chicago Public Library
View all screenings taking place at Chicago Public Library branches here. 

⚫ The Davis Theater
Chen Kaige’s 1993 film FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE (171 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday at 7pm. Screening presented by Amoment Books. More info here.

⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
George Roy Hill’s 1972 film SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE (100 min, 35mm) screens Friday, 7pm, as part of the Psychodynamic Cinema series.

John Lasseter’s 2006 film CARS (117 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday, 9:30pm, as part of the Board Picks series.

Three films by Robert Beavers—FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF… (1971/1998, 48 min, 35mm), THE PAINTING (1972/1999, 13 min, 35mm), and DEDICATION: BERNICE HODGES (2024, 16 min, 16mm)—screen Sunday, 7pm, as part of the Robert Beavers: My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure series. The screening will be preceded by an introduction by Beavers, who will stay for a post-screening Q&A.

H.C. Potter’s 1948 film MR. BLANDINGS BUILDS HIS DREAM HOUSE (94 min, 35mm) screens Monday, 7pm, as part of the Painting with Light: The Cinematography of James Wong Howe series.

Jacques Rivette’s 1984 film LOVE ON THE GROUND (177 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 7pm, as part of the Jacques Rivette’s Late Style series.

Lee Daniels’ 2009 film PRECIOUS (110 min, 35mm) screens Thursday, 7pm, as part of the Black Girlhood series. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ FACETS
Kristen Stewart’s 2025 film THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER (128 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday, 2pm, presented in partnership with Cinema Femme and accompanied by an introduction and post-screening Q&A with series programmer Marya E. Gates and Rebecca Martin Fagerholm.

Albert Birney’s 2025 film OBEX (90 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday at 5pm.

Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine’s 2025 documentary TEENAGE WASTELAND (110 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday at 6pm.

Sweet Void Cinema presents a screenwriting workshop on Wednesday from 6pm to 9pm.

Lights, Camera, Legal Aid! presents a screening of Minhal Baig’s 2023 film WE GROWN NOW (93 min, Unconfirmed Format) on Thursday, 6:45pm, as part of their annual spring fundraiser. Doors open at 5:30pm. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Film Studies Center (at the University of Chicago) 
“A Fountain Which Never Stops: Films by Ute Aurand” screens Friday, 7pm, with Aurand in person. More info here.

⚫ Haymarket House (800 W. Buena Ave.)
Films for a Changing world presents Anurima Bhargava’s 2025 documentary TEACHING AMERICA (22 min, Digital Projection) on Saturday, 6pm, followed by a discussion led by young leaders from Chicago Freedom School. More info here.

⚫ Leather Archives & Museum (6418 N. Greenview Ave.)
Bijou Video presents Jack Deveau’s 1975 film BALLET DOWN THE HIGHWAY (93 min, Digital Projection) on Saturday at 7pm. More info here.

⚫ Mouse Arts and Letters (555 W. 31st St.)
Ali Mirsepassi and Hamed Yousefi’s 2015 documentary THE FABULOUS LIFE AND THOUGHT OF AHMAD FARDID (Digital Projection) screens Monday at 7pm.

Join A.S. Hamrah for a discussion of his new books Algorithm of the Night and Last Week in End Times Cinema on Thursday at 7pm. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Stuart Rosenberg’s 1967 film COOL HAND LUKE (126 min, 35mm) screens Saturday, 11:30am, and Sidney Poitier’s 1980 film STIR CRAZY (119 min, 35mm) screens Sunday, 11:30am, both as part of the Prison Break: Films of Escape series.

Jim Sharman’s 1975 film THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (100 min, 35mm) screens Saturday at midnight.

Rated Q and Ramona Slick present Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 film MOULIN ROUGE! (127 min, 35mm) on Thursday at 9:45pm, with preshow drinks and a DJ in the Music Box lounge starting at 8:45pm and a dragshow performance in the main theater starting at 9:30pm. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Siskel Film Center
Maryam Touzani’s 2025 film CALLE MALAGA (116 min, DCP Digital) screens this week. See Venue website for showtimes.

The Chicago Palestine Film Festival begins Saturday and runs through April 25. Visit here for more information, including a complete schedule.

Gavin Hood’s 2005 film TSOTSI (95 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday, 12pm, and Wanuri Kahiu’s 2018 film RAFIKI (83 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday, 6pm, both as part of the African Cinema: From Independence to Now lecture series.

Conversations at the Edge presents An Evening With Maryam Tafakory on Thursday, 6pm, followed by a conversation with Tafakory and an audience Q&A. More info on all screenings here.

CINE-LIST: April 10 - April 16, 2026

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Brendan Boyle, Maxwell Courtright, Kyle Cubr, John Dickson, Ray Ebarb, Megan Fariello, Shaun Huhn, Tristan Johnson, Ben Kaye, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Michael Glover Smith, Brian Welesko, K.A. Westphal, David Whitehouse