Mist

Brittany Gravely | US | 2025 | 4 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

“Mist blends the occurrence of natural phenomena and an air of mourning by blanketing the viewer in fleeting yet quiet and carefully considered compositions. The air of Mist contains an unspoken nostalgia and a recognition of the way of things. It's quite a gorgeous and absorbing film with a profound sensitivity to the medium and the experience of viewing.”

-Emily Faith Martin

A Metamorphosis

Lin Htet Aung | Myanmar | 2025 | 17 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

“Oppression and violence leave their imprints on the body and memory, like a lingering noise. How do we speak of these shadowed memories? Transforming the language of broadcasting, the film mobilizes the colors of the flag and propaganda imagery, turning everyday objects into uncanny, unsettling presences. Within constricted spaces, even the most charged movements appear trapped; a once-familiar lullaby is taken over by another, now estranged, voice. Intimacy slips into unease, and play is overshadowed by control. Shaped by a poetic sensibility, the film unfolds as a deeply felt experience.”

-Jiayi Chen

The Joy of Cooking

Coleman Stewart | US | 2024 | 9 min | US Festival Premiere

“Beautiful, patient, and full of humor. Foreign bodies are flung into a riverside cave, collecting together in what seems like a pattern. A serenely disorienting work. Each frame in turn deepens its mysteries.”

-Sam Flancher

Hiding Places

Magdalena Bermudez | US | 2026 | 13 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

Aftersong

Matthew Berka | UK | 2023 | 10 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

nearer to thee in a triptych

Matt Whitman | US | 2025 | 9 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

That sanity be kept

Michael Barwise | Ireland | 2025 | 11 min | US Festival Premiere

掩眼法 Dirty Eye

Keng U Lao | Macao | 2025 | 14 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

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."

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.