2025 COMPETITION PROGRAMS

All 6 Competition Programs will be Taking Place at Chicago Filmmakers’ Firehouse Cinema from April 4th - 6th, 2025

1326 W. Hollywood Avenue Chicago, IL 60660

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Film Still: *WE DON’T TALK LIKE WE USED TO*

IS THIS THING ON? | April 4, 2025 - 6:00PM

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

Lineup

Tidal | V. A. Doch | UK | 2024 | 10 min | US Festival Premiere

Poppy, a woman working as both a night cleaner and phone sex operator in London, delivers a hazy soliloquy that drifts over the imagined female form and murkily passes through the nocturnal spaces to which she tends.

Combining 16mm and 35mm film, vinyl stickers, photograms, and lace, the filmmaker prints a strange remix of 2000s music videos that threaten to overtake their subjects by filmstrip a la Tscherkassky’s seminal Outer Space (1999).

Um Tropeço em Cinco Movimentos (A Slippage in Five Movements) | Valentina Rosset | Brazil/US | 15 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

In a stunning enactment of Toru Takemitsu's 1962 graphic score "Corona: For Pianist(s),” 16mm and Super 8 shots form a landscape film that studies the intricate topography of piano and player as attentively as it observes swaying fields and shimmering waters.

Zoomed DV video pixelation and falling tones explore the visual and auditory connotations of “noise” as they relate to our understanding of dimensional space.

Bounded Intimacy | Ayanna Dozier | US | 2024 | 6 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

An inscrutable and silent glimpse of a New York City sex worker, at once voyeuristic and somehow familiar, as she walks the street and seduces the camera.

WE DON'T TALK LIKE WE USED TO | Joshua Gen Solondz | US | 2023 | 36 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

“Part travelogue, part affective almanac, and part cinematic noise show,” this haptic feedback loop presents six years’ compilation of travel diary and solarized fragments. The film poetically lingers on homeland, pollution, fatherhood, and human connection across Hong Kong, New Hampshire, Japan, and Brooklyn.

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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!”

Lineup

First Love / Late Spring | Brian Lu | US | 2024 | 3 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

As Rae drives along the road leading off campus for the last time, trapped between luggage and brimming duffel bags, she wills time to rewind itself and bring her back.

it's called round like a head | Molly Pattison, Andrew Wood | US | 2024 | 6 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

A film about two people shooting the same horizon and the staccato experience by which they try to piece together empirical knowledge of a place.

Walking from Paris to Brest | Vincent Le Port | France | 6 min | US Festival Premiere

In 1927, filmmaker Oskar Fischinger traveled for three weeks along the side roads between Munich and Berlin, filming frame by frame the people he met along the way. This is a 2020 remake of the film during a month-long walk between Paris and Brest.

We Make The Road By Walking | Ben Creech | US | 2024 | 9 min | World Festival Premiere

A Midwest roadtrip symphony on the way to witness totality.

a film with sound (take three) | Josh Weissbach | US | 2023 | 3 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

A father and daughter make a new movie after the daughter requests to make a film with sound after making a silent one the previous year.

Rain, as circular shapes of memory imprinted on the fast-paced celluloid or as liquid moving sculptures of the present in digital form, documents a verbal interaction between two people.

rigmarole | Tristen Ives | US | 2024 | 8 min | World Festival Premiere
Diary entries via walking around with a camera and reacting to immediate reality: light pulses, expressions of gender identity, moving across the country, and dancing like a slut.

A Home Movie | Renato Garvez Umali | US | 2024 | 4 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

Shot on color 16mm, this film is a rumination about the value of a home movie, in light of special events and the people in them.

Fantasia (The Weary Wheel) | Brett Swenson | US | 2024 | 10 min | World Festival Premiere

A film that explores reproductive fantasies of suburban middle class American life, with moments of real tenderness.

Park & Ride | John Clark | US | 6 min | World Festival Premiere

A guy visits his favorite parking lot and invites viewers to reflect on the mundane and the hidden beauty within it.

How to Run a Trotline | Carl Elsaesser | US | 2024 | 19 min

A rhythmic reflection on paternal tethers, both filmic and genealogical, that fishes for something alive and kicking in each of its brimming images.

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Film Still: *a film with sound (take three)*

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

Lineup

Full Out | Sarah Ballard | US | 2025 | 15 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

A 16mm dérive through the tacit embodied knowledge of mass hysteria, bending an arc-in-circle posture across time from a 19th century Parisian medical stage to contemporary cheerleaders on the gymnasium floor.

eyes closed see stars | josh brainin | US | 2025 | 12 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

Shot on Hi8 and VHS tape, a surreal coming-of-age dance is cloaked in lace and datamosh, staggering under the influence of a mysterious cordial and crawling into Lake Michigan.

The Act of Not Seeing with One's Own Eyes | Markus Maicher | Austria | 2023 | 9 min

The real and undulating journey of a swallowed camera through the filmmaker’s gut, seeking out clairvoyant flickers and hypnotic agitation in the throes of chronic gastritis.

True Colours | Matthew Berka | UK | 2022 | 6 min | US Festival Premiere

A fragmentary essay combining Super 8 and digital footage, X-ray imagery, and medical animation to exorcize a portrait of the soul caught somewhere between the viscera and their subjection to electromagnetic forces.

Eurydice in the Underworld | Felicity E. Palma | US | 2024 | 14 min | World Festival Premiere

Restaging Kathy Acker’s volume of the same name, this 16mm essay renders scanned landscapes and burning light leaks to contemplate the social isolation, psychosexual crisis, and interior reckoning precipitated by terminal breast cancer.

A slow panning experiment in video-composited landscape uncannily stitches together foggy mountain footage and digitally altered mid-century UFO photographs to generate a tableau of wildlife in eerie motion.

Sinking Feeling | Zachary Epcar | US | 2024 | 21 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

A speculation on the tender and abject fantasies that could burst into life when a San Francisco train grinds to a no-signal halt in a transbay tunnel. White collar commuters wax existential from the sterile corners of their high-rise offices as they reminisce on a fleeting sense of intimacy turned orgiastic state of exception.

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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

Lineup

Translated to “supervision” in English, a witty examination of the conceptual art world through the lens of a gallery attendant’s fidgety boredom on duty in the confines of the white cube.

Personally I Find It Rude to Be Boring | Derek Spencer | US | 2024 | 9 min

A voyeuristic long take tracks the alley scene osmosis outside an underground LA rave as a social swarm grows. There will be laughing, hugging, chatting, arguing, sipping, smoking, strutting, shimmying, kissing, twirling, clashing, yelling, joking, riffing, puking, punching, weeping, and gnashing of teeth, then stumbling on home.

The Muppet | Dan Black | US | 2024 | 5 min | US Festival Premiere

A haunted remix of the FOX TV show Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test (2023), in which celebrities receive hellish military training under the watchful eye of elite Special Forces operatives. In episode two, Tara Reid is plunged into freezing water and asked to remember what the acronym MUPPET stands for.

Meandering through an eclectic montage of found footage culled from archival film, newsreels, and video games, the filmmaker parodically recalls his own confusion when asked unanswerable questions about being a displaced Syrian now living in the Netherlands.

Foot to Ground | Christopher Thompson | US | 2024 | 9 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

Taking its title from the literal translation of pied-à-terre, the film mythologizes a boring bacchanalia for Manhattan’s post-residential luxury apartments. Real estate walkthroughs are threatened by apocalypse and interrupted by acid-wash events as sci-fi narration evokes plate tectonics, cave dwelling yesteryears, and resurgent modernist fantasies.

...And You Had Tourette's | Luis Figueroa Caunedo | US | 2024 | 7 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

A beautiful nightmare surreally approximating the slippages and confusions of an international student’s assimilation into American youth culture.

A Message From Humboldt | Matt Feldman | US | 2024 | 7 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

A 16mm in-camera experiment that kaleidoscopically beams its way through the dark of a Milwaukee apartment, descending into walls, pipes, whispers, and the old haunt of days past.

A familial yet eerie dialogue around spirituality, dreams, and transformation between son, brother, and father who share in a curiosity about filmmaking.

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Film Still: *Personally I Find It Rude To Be Boring*

(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

Lineup

Adrift Potentials | Leonardo Pirondi | Brazil/US | 2024 | 12 min

A speculative attempt to reconstruct an unfinished Brazilian film shot and half-assembled during the military dictatorship of the 1970s. The results comprise a floating diary of radio recordings, voice interviews, and empty rooms that contemplates the country’s colonial past.

refrigerator hum | Jade Wong | US | 2025 | 15 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

Filmmaker, mother, and grandmother converse, exploring care, shared knowledge, and images of food-making around their family restaurant. Memory is reanimated through varied image formats: 35mm portraits on oscillating lenticular prints, laserjet prints of 35mm film transferred onto 16mm loops, and photographic prints on polystyrene.

A docu-fictional coming-of-age story about two boys who are best friends separated by highway construction and the social structures of their eventual adult lives. The narration is constructed from loving phone calls and letters read aloud, which convey a pervasive nostalgia the men ultimately call into question.

Oh Paulo | Cam Archer | US | 2024 | 16 min | World Festival Premiere

Riveting firsthand contemplation of image-making, aging, and interpersonal intensity as told through the filmmaker-photographer’s impressionistic recollection of his young muses’ beautiful gestures and projected interiority.

at the bamboo green 在竹翠苑 | Xiaolu Wang | China/US | 2024 | 11 min

The filmmaker’s visit to their grandmother’s grave in Hui Muslim tradition at the foot of China’s Helan Mountains. Shot on cellphone in one continuous take, the film accentuates an in-between: visiting from America, the space of chant, and a tension generated by the camera’s presence.

I Was There, Part II | Chi Jang Yin | US/Japan | 2024 | 10 min

Combining newly uncovered 16mm footage of the bombed landscape of Hiroshima from United States Army archives with contemporary images of the city, the film recounts a dream of mother, daughter, responsibility, and survival.

A retreading of the desert journey captured in Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie (2015) calls into question the nameless abstraction with which Akerman blanketed the Israeli-occupied Palestinian landscape, and attempts to politically dialogue with the filmmaker in the wake of her suicide.

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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.

Lineup

The everyday, the planetary, and their shared symphony tangle together to form an overgrown house, finding an “oikos” in “ecology” and taking into consideration family and labor politics that might escape calculability.

in place of a hollow tree | Eislow Johnson | US | 2024 | 8 min | US Festival Premiere

A flock of chimney swifts migrate from the Amazon basin across northern Illinois, interacting with infrasonic pulse from deep ocean waves as they feel their way.

Underwater and above for air, movements of flora are choreographed in a hand-processed whirl, solarized effects spreading like algae.

Lacuna | Carlo Nasisse, Shirley He | US | 2024 | 13 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

A free-flowing documentary that wades in the remembered waters of California’s ancient Tulare Lake, now drained to dry valley and residual wetlands, observing industrial processes that shape the land and the living beings that call the area home.

Distant Early Warning | Anna Chiaretta Lavatelli | US | 2024 | 9 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

Archival 8mm footage documents Bell Telephone’s 1955 construction of a nuclear warning system at the far reaches of the earth––Alaska’s Aleutian Islands––where machinery swings wide, laborers hack the ice, fish glisten like wet tallies in the snow, and digital manipulation tips the filmmaker’s hand.

A Light Unseen | James Sansing | US | 2024 | 10 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

Camera and spider form a bond through intricate light manipulation, splaying open a new way of seeing.

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