2026 Onion City Experimental Film Festival: April 9-12
Festival artwork by Riesling Dong
Tickets Now Available!
Trailer created by Tanner Masseth
Competition Program Trailers
Created by Elise Schierbeek
ECSTATIC DEVOTIONS | April 10, 2026 - 6:00PM
ECSTATIC DEVOTIONS are rites, relics, and remains. The program comprises acts that corrupt the surface, acts of transmutation and metamorphosis, and gestures burned into the body’s muscle memory—movements of a spiritual spiral.
INVISIBLE CITIES | April 11, 2026 - 12:00PM
Traipse through INVISIBLE CITIES, the domain of speculative societies evoked when the unexpected happens. Works in this program contend with isolation, utopianism, and apocalypse.
AFTERIMAGE | April 11, 2026 - 2:00PM
This program is a collage of diaries and fragments. The films drift and return like an afterthought, like reflections or memories that lingered. Fleeting, hazy, at times hypnotic, AFTERIMAGE moves like a flâneur, walking across space and time.
VENTURED GAINS | April 11, 2026 - 4:00PM
Tally up your VENTURED GAINS to explore risk and reward with an abiding humor. Liability, surveillance, breaking, entering, investment, theft, and gambling. The works of this program take on "vulgar extravaganzas," "fears and veneers," and "social acerbities."
Trailer for Tycoon (2025) by Charlotte Zhang
LATE NIGHT WITH TYCOON | April 11, 2026 - 8:00PM
In her feature directorial debut, TYCOON (2025), Charlotte Zhang remixes low-budget filmmaking techniques to reimagine a dystopian Los Angeles in the near future, seen through the eyes of two wandering youths. The program opens with DIRTY EYE (2025) by Keng U Lao, a journey through the illusionistic city of Macau—the Las Vegas of the East—blurred by sleights of hand. Charlotte Zhang will be in attendance for Q&A with Chicago film programmer Joshua Minsoo Kim of Tone Glow.
STRUCTURAL COLLAPSE | April 12, 2026 - 12:00PM
Break down with STRUCTURAL COLLAPSE, a lineup of works that burst apart, topple, freak out, undo, disintegrate, and at times sow chaos. Pixels explode, the internet hemorrhages, institutions shut down, and language fails to cohere. We walk through the funhouse, mess up our ABCs, learn to fall, and punch the clock harder than we ever have before.
BLUE, BLUE | April 12, 2026 - 2:00PM
The color blue. The color Maggie Nelson fell in love with for us to have the Bluets. In response, this program presents a set of moving bluets. Some films are literally blue, drenched in cyan; others explore grief, desire, the loss of innocence, the ache of sehnsucht. Blue is what we make of ourselves, and blue is what we remember.
MUTABLE RECORDS | April 12, 2026 - 4:00PM
Parse the past as MUTABLE RECORDS, a program of works that deconstruct oppressive histories through montage, testimony, surrealism, and reverie. Memories and archival footage are arranged with insight, dignity, and curiosity.