2026 COMPETITION PROGRAMS

All 8 Competition Programs will take place at Chicago Filmmakers’ Firehouse Cinema (1326 W. Hollywood Ave.) from April 10th - 12th

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.

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XTENDED RELEASE (version 2.5) | Joshua Gen Solondz | US | 2026 | 16 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

A handmade sculptural collage film on 16mm, collaged with tape, ink, skin, semen, and various corrosive chemicals.

In collaboration with painter Huh Yunhee, this work documents a year-long practice of filming the sunrise—in all four seasons—through multiple exposures on four 100ft rolls of 16mm film, creating a compressed record of time and light.

All of This Must Be Paid For | Gabi Rudin | US | 2025 | 13 min

The wellness universe evaluates the spiritual mechanics of the pain-body as it searches for answers.

nearer to thee in a triptych | Matt Whitman | US | 2025 | 9 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

Structured as a devotional triptych, this film reflects on inhabiting a house filled with belongings left behind by deceased family members through close studies of organic remnants from the surrounding landscape and veiled domestic spaces.

The Gloaming is a metaphorical tale of pyrophytic transmutation, of metamorphosis through fire. Inspired by medieval paintings of celestial portents, The Gloaming is a work of bio-mysticism that takes the form of a fable. In a time of environmental uncertainty, the film offers a story of adaptation and survival.

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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.

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A portrait of matrescence and post-partum depression in the time of pandemic lockdown.

The Phalanx | Ben Balcom | US | 2025 | 14 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

Letters from the Ceresco community trace the fragility of harmony, the dream of life in association, the frictions that give way to fracture. Members of the phalanx drift apart, lingering in private corners, suspended in speculative time.

Evacuations | Lilli Carré | US | 2025 | 7 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

Painted formless figures haunt recent photos of emptied-out public spaces. As cel-animated smear frames, they perform various repetitive acts in these settings, with movements expressing a helpless, frantic energy felt in our current moment.

Fresh Values | Drew Durepos and Isaac Brooks | US | 2025 | 12 min

In the near future, a struggling urban food co-op adopts AR technology to save their store. The strategy proves too successful.

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

Women pretend to be rocks. Military operations masquerade as art education. One woman deserts to pursue a more radical act of unselfing.

A traveler and a narrator describe an abandoned city as we arrive at a post-apocalyptical landscape. We explore the genesis of a countryside city in Brazil.

The Joy of Cooking | Coleman Stewart | US | 2024 | 9 min | US Festival Premiere

A figure casts out tennis balls that find their place amongst new ecologies within a memory-cave on the banks of the Ohio river.

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*My Grandma Still Cleans My Uncle’s Room (Mi Mamita Todavía Mantiene el Cuarto de Mi Tío)* (2026)

*The Garden of Electric Delights* (2025)

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.

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Guarita | Lua Borges | Brazil | 2025 | 3 min

A one-roll unedited 16mm film that collages the multiplicity of guard houses in São Paulo city. A few remain active with freelance guards paid by the community, but most of them are abandoned due to the rise of digital surveillance.

Palimpsest One: Now U See Us | Michael Alexander Morris | US | 2025 | 4 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

A series of one-reel diary films made up of improvised superimpositions. The mundane and the absurd aspects of contemporary life overwrite one another. Captured in camera without editing on 8mm and blown up to 16mm.

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

A phenomenon captured in the park, days after the death of a friend.

WRIGHTFILM | Ben Creech | US | 2024 | 90 sec | World Festival Premiere

A road movie shot at three Frank Lloyd Wright houses.

An undocumented immigrant recounts memories of his childhood home while telling the story of the handmade wallet tied to his journey across the border.

Fjord Time | Jonathan Johnson and Carleen Maur | US | 2025 | 5 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

Two young sisters guide us through a meditation on time, play, and nature, using the present moment as a spell against acceleration.

As night falls over the fields, a woman looks into unknown areas: the space after a poem, the distance between map and territory, the darkness between film frames. This 16mm work was shot at Film Farm in Mt. Forest, Ontario, then re-photographed with flashlight contact-printing.

In a dense, opaque city, a man walks at a distance, cut off from the world. He collects fragments, post-its that he keeps without really knowing why. This absurd system becomes a method, an attempt to fit into the world.

The film transforms Bosch’s surreal visions into a shifting, electric world of moving color and sound. Flickering signals and synthetic nature create a sensually charged, otherworldly landscape.

From mouth to cave to fire to screen to war to skin, this is a dizzying 16mm portrait of an increasingly chaotic present, one whose political contours are seemingly affected by everything and nothing all at once.

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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."

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Emergency Exits | Lucky Marvel | US | 2025 | 8 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

Thematically prompted by the word "trouble," the author of this video-diary frolics throughout the city relieving himself via windows and staircases with some Hi8 observations in-between.

A silent psychological mystery set in the Whitgift Shopping Centre, Croydon. The film was shot on B&W Reversal Super 8 and was first exhibited as part of a group show at Conditions Studio Programme.

Learning from Learning from Las Vegas | Sam Taffel and Gillian Waldo | US | 2025 | 18 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

An experimental adaptation of the seminal architectural text Learning from Las Vegas (1972) by architects Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi. The film charts the evolution of their professional and romantic relationship while exploring the motels, neon signs, and wedding chapels described in the book.

Injured? | Eislow Johnson | US | 2026 | 14 min | World Festival Premiere

Need help? Crashouts, manifestation influencers and injury lawyers collide in this breakneck ride through the Midwest. 50 years after attorney ads were first legalized in the United States, their ubiquitous self-portraits (allegedly) invoke a churn-and-burn economy of volume, velocity, fears, and veneers.

Call of the Void | John Q. Public | US | 2025 | 7 min | World Festival Premiere

Will the siren sound? This agitprop piece featuring banned words and phrases is necessary pushback against oppressive forces attacking human rights, personhood, economic inequality, and environmental advocacy in the United States.

The Pit | Curtis Miller | US | 2026 | 7 min | World Festival Premiere

Hand gestures from a trading-floor handbook flicker alongside fragments of Chicago's LaSalle Street, where signals once used to move commodities echo in stone, glass, and air. Through rapid collage, the film explores how capital appears not as an invisible force but as a rhythm that circulates between hands and architecture, leaving its patterns behind.

A documentary crew take a pub crawl through 1990s Derry (Northern Ireland), observing the young revellers who give themselves to the night while the eyes of the security forces watch on.

explant / implant | Josh Weissbach | US | 2025 | 4 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

A lifetime of surgeries continues with an upgrade in battery life and a downgrade in scar tissue when the filmmaker has his original pacemaker replaced after sixteen years.

MICROBUDGET | Ben Creech | US | 2025 | 5 sec | World Festival Premiere

A film made from a single dollar bill.

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*Learning from Learning from Las Vegas* (2025)

LATE NIGHT WITH TYCOON | April 11, 2026 - 8:00PM

Co-presented by Tone Glow

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.

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A tale of a Joker, an eye, and an illusion. In Las Vegas of the East, a kid blacklisted by the casinos wanders through the city's dazzling lights, uncovering the King's secret in a forgotten landfill—a cosmic connection to a mystical tree that holds the fabric of reality.

Los Angeles on the cusp of the 2028 Summer Olympics: a series of devastating livestock viruses have wiped out meat and poultry production across the nation, leaving genetically-modified cockroaches the most viable alternative. Meanwhile, a cockroach infestation of biblical proportions overwhelms the city, triggering a rash of eminent domain abuses. Two young grifters dream up their next big score in a paranoid landscape perpetually reshaped by the collapse between legitimized and illegitimate forms of celebration and theft.

Read Tone Glow’s recent profile of Charlotte Zhang here.

About Tone Glow

Joshua Minsoo Kim is a culture writer and film programmer whose writing about music and film can be found at Pitchfork, BOMB Magazine, The Wire, Rolling Stone, NPR, the Chicago Reader, Stereogum, Billboard, Metrograph, Cinema Scope, and MUBI Notebook. He is currently writing a book about music, sound, and silence in avant-garde film for Repeater Books. He is also a high school science teacher in the Chicagoland area. JMK is the founder and editor-in-chief of Tone Glow, an independent publication centered on experimental film and music and featuring longform Q&A interviews and album reviews.

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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.

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Horror of reverberating language; semantically unstable encounter with objects, images, and words. A brief treatise on fruit gone wild.

Cobwebs Spun Back & Forth In The Sky | Nick Vyssotsky | US | 2021 | 18 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

A montage of videos culled from various social media platforms set to a medley of Philip Glass compositions originally featured in the 1982 Godfrey Reggio film Koyaanisqatsi. Both a self-portrait of the artist's life online and simultaneously as a portrait of the internet as a whole.

Acetone Reality | Michael Bell-Smith and Sara Magenheimer | US | 2025 | 13 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

Images cascade and collide, as animation, found images, and the artists' own video recordings crash against a dialogue between computer-generated voices exploring the wonders of acetone and the nature of meaning. Across teetering montage, blocky pixels, smeared colors, and cryptic iconography constitute an "insane, yet validated reality."

My Structuralist Film | Angelo Madsen | US | 2026 | 6 min | World Festival Premiere

Set up as a confessional-cum-guided meditation, My Structuralist Film uses performance artist Tehching Hsieh's One Year Performance (“Time Clock Piece”) as a framework to illustrate the filmmaker's (presumable) insides. Considering the limits and limitations of disclosure, this project positions the act of looking not as an offering or an exchange, but as an unyielding neoliberal, capitalist thirst to consume the trans body, to literally see from the inside.

Chew This! | Delphyne Panther-Brutzkus | US | 2025 | 2 min

Influenced by Yoko Ono's 1964 performance "Cut Piece," the film is an explosion of energy, anger, and spirit that explores sexual exploitation and violence against female/femme bodies. Short, fast, and sweet like an angry spitfire punk song, blink and you'll miss the show!

Inspired by the surrealist game of "exquisite corpse," the film pieces together the story of a Harris mud crab who is a new species in the waters of the Baltic Sea since 2011. The film unfolds a layered story of "invasive species," disrupted ecosystems, and the questions they raise about human values in a world of constant environmental flux.

Ridethrough | Elijah Valter | US | 2025 | 11 min | World Festival Premiere

Obsession with the moments leading up to the end. Online adrenaline junkies. Simulated thrills and virtual realities. There are sinister forces embedded in the metadata.

受难日 Fallen Day | Xiaolu Wang | US | 2025 | 9 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

A dragon dance troupe, an aikido class, an ice skating rink. Three scenarios through which the sensation of falling—or learning to fall—become metaphysical ruminations on modes of existence that draw strength from letting go.

Structural Changes | Jonah Primiano | US | 2025 | 2 min | World Festival Premiere

A camera moves through the architecture of the renowned private art school, California Institute of the Arts, while a man touches up paint on the neglected exterior. Somewhere inside, the upper administration drafts increasingly dire emails to send to its faculty and staff.

Language Decay | Zazie Ray-Trapido | US | 2025 | 3 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

A broken camera captures days with the filmmaker’s grandmother, revealing versions of her that feel foreign to both of them. As she slowly forgets her native tongue, past selves emerge and decay, mirroring the transformation of living languages. All sequences are intentionally left unsubtitled, letting memory and loss unfold naturally.

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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.

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Heaven and Earth | Kylie Walters | US | 2025 | 4 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

A family picks a blueberry bush. An intricate meditation on language, light, and nature in New England. Named after the Louise Glück poem.

Midsummer is a cyanotype photogram film, where the sunlight, along with plants, insects, and water, are all employed in the process of filmmaking. The production began during a month-long residency in Finland, coinciding with Juhannus, the celebration of the longest day of the year, when the sun doesn't set.

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

Based on the writings of the English nature writer Richard Jefferies and the music of French composer Lili Boulanger, this film-poem is a meditation on the lingering afterimages left behind by the dead. Filmed on 16mm with a voice-over from the contemporary supernatural English writer Quentin S. Crisp.

N/A (Not Available) | Robert Orlowski and Martha Orlowski | US | 2022 | 5 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

The innocence of a home movie is called into question when the filmmaker's grandmother unexpectedly denies consent to be photographed. In an effort to respect her wishes, the possibility of collaboration opens.

A work rooted in grief for the filmmaker’s father, who passed away in 2007. It is an exploration of memory—its instability, fragile authenticity, and the ways it is shaped by the materials that record it.

The film reopens a colonial story through the voices of three Sudanese girls forcibly baptized in 1855. Against a blue backdrop, their performance pries open the pain and injustice of displacement and colonial violence.

To Summon A Seer | Alan Medina | US | 2025 | 8 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

Apertured voyages, orbs of light, and memories of migration summon a clairvoyant into the big city, confounding a sense of place through blurred and distant recollection.

Placeholder | Jesse McLean | US | 2026 | 13 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

Amid a pandemic and a failing marriage, a woman retreats into obsessive fantasy and the boundaries between reality and reverie blur. Lost in a frozen Antarctic landscape inspired by Frank Hurley's 1914 Endurance expedition photographs, escapism becomes a path back, a mirror revealing how far she's drifted from herself, and a space where she can begin to heal.

Daria has written her first manuscript about falling in love with a mysterious girl called abi (blue). The night flowers in her garden hide the secrets of a country that has turned love stories into routine crime scenes.

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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.

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A synthetic realm unfolds, bound together by a dark, oily slime that merges Jurassic-era flora with plastic shopping mall plants. Petroleum, refined and unrefined, exposes the gory logics of petro-capitalism and global extraction.

In the houses, after parting, mothers were made up of tears. Sons were transformed into empty glass cups. And lullabies became a curse. The film examines the suffering and resilience of the Burmese people, using distinct elements culled from political opera under repetitive military dictatorships in Myanmar.

Man number 4 | Miranda Pennell | UK | 2024 | 10 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

Gaza, December 2023. A confrontation with a disturbing photograph on social media triggers questions about what it means to be an onlooker.

In 2012, Mohamed witnessed his best friend gunned down by an armed militia on the outskirts of Damascus, Syria; blood spilled into the lake and contaminated his memory. Ten years later, the reflections on the Laurentian waters brings back Mohamed's trauma, telling us about death, immigration, and anger.

Suspicions About the Hidden Realities of Air | Sam Drake | US | 2025 | 9 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

Fragmentary accounts reveal a concealed history of Cold War era human radiation experiments, surfacing through a haze of manipulation and embedded studies. Desert dust settles into teeth, inscribing a residual record. Contaminated images conjure the unseen.

The Rabbit Always Dies | Oona Taper | US | 2025 | 9 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

An experimental documentary on the facts and fantasies of the history of pregnancy tests from the 1930s–60s, which relied on the use of live frogs and rabbits. These pregnancy tests expanded our understanding of hormones, gave women more reproductive choice, but caused ecological crisis: they decimated certain amphibian populations.

Api (April, 1949) | Harper Stone | US | 2025 | 11 min | Chicago Festival Premiere

A one-take recorded translation of a man's proposal letter and firm vision of life through love. Penned after my paternal grandfather's time in a forced labor camp during WWII, Api (April, 1949) is a reconstruction of his bid for agency during a time of oppression and destruction.

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