2026 SPECIAL EVENTS

ONION CITY OPENING NIGHT — USEFUL FANTASY

Co-presented by 150 Media Stream.

Gene Siskel Film Center (164 N. State Street) | April 9, 2026 - 8:00PM

The 36th Onion City Experimental Film Festival opens with USEFUL FANTASY, a special shorts program at the Gene Siskel Film Center curated by artist Peter Burr and presented in partnership with 150 Media Stream. The program features a 35mm print of Suzan Pitt's iconic ASPARAGUS (1979) restored by the Academy Film Archive, as well as Peter Tscherkassky’s avant-garde masterpiece OUTER SPACE (1999, 35mm). Accompanying these prints are digital presentations of Peter Burr’s ALONE WITH THE MOON (2012), Vince Collins’s MALICE IN WONDERLAND (1982), Shana Moulton’s THE MOUNTAIN WHERE EVERYTHING IS UPSIDE DOWN (2007), and Boris Labbé’s LA CHUTE (2018). Peter Burr will be in attendance to present a work-in-progress preview of his generative artwork MAINTENANCE GAME (2026). Suzan Pitt's ASPARAGUS (1979) courtesy of the Academy Film Archive. Co-presented by 150 Media Stream. The program is preceded by a reception and installation hosted by 150 Media Stream at 150 N. Riverside Plaza from 5:30 – 7:30pm.

Most fantasy is useless. That's the point. It's the space we reserve for what doesn't have to justify itself. USEFUL FANTASY insists on having both of its ways, gathering films that build worlds through their psychic accumulation, letting meaning emerge so indirectly it might not emerge at all. Not all fantasy does the same work. Some fantasy simplifies, promising escape into the manageable and known. The fantasy gathered here moves in the opposite direction. It opens doors rather than closing them. It intensifies uncertainty rather than resolving it. In an era where imagination is constantly recruited for branding, forecasting, or visioning corporate futures, these works practice a different kind of thinking. They construct environments that resist extraction, realms that can't be converted into actionable insights or reassuring narratives. Their allegories feel urgent and specific without ever declaring what they're allegories of. This is fantasy as a form of refusal: not escape from reality but escape from the demand that reality be simple or weirdness eventually resolve into something we can use. These works stay strange precisely because they don't owe us anything. They hold open space for thinking that might circle its target forever and refuse to land. (Peter Burr)

[WE DON’T KNOW YET] WHAT A CINEMA CAN DO

Co-presented by the Center for Concrete and Abstract Machines (CCAM)

Public Works Gallery (2141 W. North Ave) | April 10, 2026 - 8:00PM

Doors Open at 7:30PM & Show Starts at 8:00PM

Onion City and CCAM co-present the third annual edition of [WE DON’T KNOW YET] WHAT A CINEMA CAN DO, a night of new media live performance with the theme of Disintegrating Archives.

This event explores the resonances of “expanded cinema” today, putting cinematic art to the tasks of resistance, rupture, and reconfiguration of mediatic experience. We ask: how can experimental modes of animating sound and moving images reconfigure the possibility of our relating to one another anew? Re:: mix; vision; mediate; compile; concile; wire; work; enact. 

This year WDKY features new works or reworkings by three artists developing distinct technical, aesthetic, and cultural niches: AJ McClenon’s text, repurposed materials, moving and still images, performance, and sound work is driven by familial and collective grief, water, Blackness, geomorphology, abolitionist thought, and the global future. The arts collective Alterotics’ moving-image art, archival research, and event hosting activates public life for trans/queer people. James Connolly’s real-time sound and media performance activates expressive potentials of technical systems sequestered behind consumer interfaces.  

These three artists are also joined by special guest Aria Pedraza, who will introduce the Midwest Rave Culture Archive.

Note: this program will contain one performance that uses flickering lights and another that presents sexual content.

Advance ticket purchase recommended. Admission increases to $40 rush tickets at the door.

BEYOND RESOLUTION: FILMS BY SABINE GRUFFAT

Sponsored by the Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Chicago Filmmakers Firehouse Cinema (1326 W. Hollywood Ave) | April 11, 2026 - 6:00PM

Join us for a screening and conversation with artist Sabine Gruffat, who is touring a selection of her extensive filmography this spring. This special program favors ambiguity and resists resolution. The nearer the gaze, the more obscure the view. Illegibility here is not an escape from politics, but a way of inhabiting it differently: as a site of tension, friction, and possibility. These films draw from a range of genres and layered techniques. Images are processed to draw attention to the hidden logics in software, hardware, and materiality. In repurposing media, the works call attention to the histories from which meaning’s fragile frameworks emerge.

Lineup:

Disclaimer | Marseille, France | 2025 | 5 min | Digital

The following film has been modified from its original version. It has been formatted to fit this screen.

Headlines: BOMB PARTS | Detroit, MI | 2007 | 3 min | 16mm film to digital

A semi - automated animation process of a New York Times article results in sentence recombinations that sometimes made sense while emphasizing certain words and images. The writing from February 27, 2007 is about bomb parts found in Baghdad that the newspaper speculates were planted by Iran. 

A Return to the Return to Reason | Chapel Hill, NC | 2014 | 3 min | Laser etched 35mm film to digital

A tribute to Man Ray's 1923 film Le Retour à La Raison. In this film Man Ray’s “original” film was digitized with its scratches, and splices, then compiled into digital filmstrips. These filmstrips are used to output a dithered image that the laser engraver may etch onto black film leader.

Brave New World | Chapel Hill, NC | 2015 | 7 min | 35mm film to digital

In 1927 Henry Ford bought land in the Amazon for a rubber plantation and called it Fordlandia. In this video, 35mm archival silent documentary film footage shot by Henry Ford’s own filmmakers is reworked and given a soundtrack revealing the colonial lens through which the filmmakers apprehended unfamiliar nature.

Black Oval White | Owego, NY | 2009 | 3 min | DV to digital

A video recording of a computer-generated abstract animation that is keyed, wiped and matted by electronic oscillators and feedback. The sound of the electronic oscillators is delayed and pitched to produce modulations.

Take it Down | Chapel Hill, NC | 2019 | 13 min | Solarized color positive 35mm film to digital

A last stand for the silent guardians of the old order. Take It Down is a filmic day of reckoning for the Old Confederate South. What is up must come down, like the Confederate soldier monuments standing in court house squares across the South. Solarized film makes positives bleed into negatives.

Framelines | Washington, DC and Chapel Hill, NC | 2017 | 10 min | Laser-etched color negative to digital

Framelines is an abstract scratch film made by laser etching abstract patterns on the film emulsion of negative and positive 35mm film. The strips of film were then re-photographed on top of each other as photograms then contact printed. The soundtrack layers the noise made by the etched optical track.

Moving or Being Moved | Chapel Hill, NC | 2021 | 11 min | Digital

Post-modern dance theory by Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer is put to work while a woman cleans the house in a motion capture suit. The everyday performance of domestic labor is teleported into a surreal game world where an emotionally responsive AI chatbot provides no answers.

Souvenir Statuette | Ménerbes, France and Sante Fe, NM | 2024 | 11 min | Digital

Souvenirs of souvenirs. Souvenir Statuettes were animated in real spaces with a custom made augmented-reality application. Whether they be cast from a mold, or 3d scanned and propagated online, Souvenir Statuettes aim for virality. Some of the quasi-objects in this video were once objects, others are non-objects or computer model imaginaries.

OFF CENTER: GANGSTERISM (ONION CITY CLOSING NIGHT)

Co-presented by OFF CENTER, Gene Siskel Film Center

Gene Siskel Film Center (164 N. State Street) | April 12, 2026 - 7:00PM

Celebrate closing night of Onion City Experimental Film Festival at the Gene Siskel Film Center with Isiah Medina’s latest feature. GANGSTERISM (2025, Canada, 84 min) updates the gangster film as the tale of director-gangster Clem, who ponders the politics of film circulation, financing, and representation while his artist cronies track down an old comrade rumored to be a leaker. Isiah Medina and composer Kieran Daly are scheduled to attend for a post-screening conversation.

“There are few filmmakers working today, who are more committed to the inordinate possibilities of the cut and the transformative power of montage than Isiah Medina.” —Daniel Turner, ICA London

“Taking his recondite method into consideration, we ascertain that Medina is himself a student, but one who has graduated to the ranks of the Canadian greats.” —Craig Keller

“If classical shot-reverse-shot form observes conversational propriety, Medina’s flickering approach demonstrates a cinema capable of moving at the pace of thought—ideas which fit jaggedly into one another, not flowing so much as butting heads.” —Dylan Adamson, In Review

Tickets for the Closing Night film need to be purchased directly from the Gene Siskel Film Center. Advance tickets can be purchased online below.