Thanks for Attending Onion City

HOW TO RUN A TROTLINE (2024) by Carl Elsaesser - Juror Prize Winner

“Languid, effortless editing weaves together a feast of associative images. Somber in tone, seasoned with knowing wit, the film explores the maturation of a father-son relationship, intertwined with an elliptical meditation on queerness. Cruising and fishing: you might never have realized how well these activities could rhyme [joke]. Elsaesser, through a montage anchored in thoughtful audio exchanges with his father, makes it all seem easy.”

– Drew Durepos

“I read a slim book in 4th or 5th grade about a redheaded woman who gets in a motorcycle accident and is cast back to some medieval forest where she is a witch tormented by villagers and a redheaded fox serves as some sort of vigil leading the character through times. The fox later becomes a ponytail on a physicist who explains something about time travel and the fox is Foxy. Carl’s and the one in this story I can barely remember. Supine and vulnerable and then quick and gone.                                    

Led out with fire.

That flame as transitional object throughout the film. sometimes almost as another lens or mediator.

Fire as the element of transformation.

Fire as damage, as sex, as light.                                                          

(Fire’s endless duets with survival.)

Gentlemen ladies gentlemen. 15 steps down. the genet, delaney, greenwell stoked romance of men’s rooms and their sexually charged potential. peep holes and glory holes and the titillation of seeing. scoping. Filming. Catching.

(To the right of the monitor where i’ve watched these films, sits a postcard made by an artist activist named ask nicely that says ‘voyeurism is participation’.) 

Michael Wallin decodings.                                                  

This is such a precise and carefully constructed film.

All the men behind the flame and whoa, the really beautiful and complicated entwinement of a portrait of the father (?) (“Do you remember any of the calls i taught you?”) his shyness to say ‘penis’. It felt gentle, not a casting him as demon for his small puritanism (and whatever can be implied by the transference of shame from one generation to the next) but a soft giggle of recognition.

How do we learn to shine our uv rays to the bees with whom we wanna commune?

Learning how to call or fish or catch. cruising. cruising through the drum tunnel of life swaying like an inflatable air dancer taped to a bicycle seat. super glorious revelatory celebratory surrender.”

– Stephanie Barber

UN ÂNE (2023) by Sirah Foighel Brutmann and eitan efrat - Juror Prize Winner

“The desert is framed with poetic detail, leading us toward the end of Chantal Ackerman's last landscape, where we have a reflective moment on naming spaces as a political act.” 

– Amanda Gutiérrez

“This film surprises with its quiet, focused point about the political power of naming and place. When the film’s project is underlined in its conclusion, it hits at once as a jarring critique and reframing of a beloved, complex filmmaker’s final work.”

– Drew Durepos

DREAMS OF MY FATHER (2024) by Jonathan Seungjoon Lee - Juror Prize Winner

“This intergenerational collaboration between a father and his two sons explores the traumatic reshaping of their family life following the departure of their wife / mother and is constructed with remarkable levity, immediacy and transparency. Co-authoring the work by passing cameras back and forth to each other, the three men risk radical honesty, using a creative mode to renew trust and accountability, but also to play and to share in laughter. The work stands out for the way in which the family members, as with the camera, switch deftly between three languages, to clarify their shared story and emotional revelations.”

– Drew Durepos

“A family collaboration on film by father and sons over dreams and self-portraits. The complexity of faith, values, and memories fade and change, becoming surreal and evocative through the lens.” 

– Amanda Gutiérrez

EURYDICE IN THE UNDERWORLD (2024) by Felicity E. Palma - Honorable Mention

“A strong narrative of a breast cancer survivor. Palma brings personal fears to the screen while confronting the viewer with their inner feelings and thoughts of embodied uncertainty.”

– Amanda Gutiérrez

“The filmmaker re-contextualizes Acker’s writing to frame her personal experience as a breast cancer survivor. Palma uses myth and disparate landscapes to limn a private subterranean mourning, pointing to the attendant social death that comes with being identified with your disease, and in time emerging into a new light.”

– Drew Durepos

BOUNDED INTIMACY (2024) by Ayanna Dozier - Honorable Mention

“As the edit unfolds, the movement from wide angle to intimate closeups subverts the safety of the voyeur’s gaze to a perplexing, at times even humorous effect. The rhythm of the lead performer’s ambulations in the frame feels bracing when it first appears, a kinetic whirl of saturated spots cutting through a bird’s eye view of the Manhattan cityscape.”

– Drew Durepos

FULL OUT (2025) by Sarah Ballard - Honorable Mention

“After the film tells us about the extraordinary potential of hysterical bodies but before the tuning of the piano (that practice of asking frequencies to align themselves in relation to each other) the voice over narration switches from third person to first person. indicting, with that small pivot of address, we viewers in the entanglement.

So that we are also performing madness, performing inclusion and belonging?

The precise, suspenseful and sometimes funny soundtrack (the movie music!) becomes our conductor. Isn’t the word conductor so apt here? Leading the edit, our emotions and our understanding of surrender and control, unanimity and trance, performance and what? What is the opposite of performance? (ask the sun.)”

– Stephanie Barber

“A rhapsody of striking, foreboding architecture and blurred bodies, exploring connections between mental illness, public performance, and the feminine.”

– Drew Durepos

IS THIS THING ON? | April 4, 2025 - 6PM

Tune into Onion City’s sonic program and ask IS THIS THING ON? as ghosts of phone calls, 2000s music videos, and the experimental avant-garde are amplified into a choppy present. The works in this program experiment with falling tones, garbled transmissions, graphic scores, and popping optical tracks. Filmic motion is tempered to the stutters of aural anticipation, harnessing the intensive power of sound in its breakdowns and absences.

Content Warning: flashing light, nudity, some loud noise experiments

TAILWIND | April 5, 2025 - 2:00PM

Pack the trunk and we are hitting the road, baby! This program is a collection of roadtrip memories, travelogues, family movies, and film diaries. There’s a revisit of a historic journey, a daydream in a parking lot, and—remember the solar eclipse last year that passed through the Midwest right after Onion City, on April 8? Filmmakers were not going to miss that good opportunity to make films. They are the star chasers, and their cameras, as we shall say with Jonas Mekas, “The camera is always running!”

VIVID DETAIL | April 5, 2025 - 4:00PM

See through new eyes in VIVID DETAIL with works that explore the outer reaches of mind-body experience under conditions of heightened awareness and temporal contraction. The films in this program chart the visceral potential of augmented perception brought on by medical interventions, brushes with death, and erotic encounter.

Content Warning: flashing light, nudity, discussion of death and/or dying, medical imagery, including some blood

FUGUE STATES | April 5, 2025 - 9:00PM

The Onion City late night program returns once again this year as FUGUE STATES, a lineup of works that embrace spells of confusion, somnambulant visions, and twists of memory. Each work in this program plays with speculation and suspense, mapping uneven nodes in an overall warped sense of humor that unfurls to reveal bizarre and sorrowful kernels of truth.

Content Warning: flashing light, military training with simulated hostages

(RE)VISITATIONS | April 6, 2025 - 3:00PM

Double back for (RE)VISITATIONS, a program centered on visits, returns, ancestry, and lineage. The works in this program take up a number of experimental documentary approaches in order to visit upon recovered footage and canonical film, loved ones and photo shoots, letters and graves.

Content Warning: discussion of death and/or dying, images of war

NICHE APPEAL | April 6, 2025 - 5:00PM

Carve out your ecological niche with this program of niche ecological works regarding our relationship to the natural world. Ancient lakes, coastal tundra, lichen colonies, and gossamer webs intermingle as prismatic meditations on non-human forces. NICHE APPEAL is about the cosmic openings and terrestrial burrows that form a dwelling place.