15 Years of the Chicago Underground Film Festival

Thursday, October 2, 6pm | Festival director Bryan Wendorf and CUFF filmmakers in person! Roger Ebert once said of the Chicago Underground Film Festival, “What you get for your money is not just admission to the films, but admission to a subculture.” For 15 years, CUFF has exhibited the vibrant media emerging from Chicago’s schools, […]

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Eyes Wide Open: Videos by Dani Leventhal

Thursday, September 25, 6pm | Dani Leventhal in person! Dani Leventhal, Show and Tell in the Land of Milk and Honey (2007). Image courtesy of the artist. At once tender and savage, Dani Leventhal’s astonishing video diaries capture the banal and the horrific to reveal the transcendent beauty and pain of daily life. In the […]

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GLITCH: Creative Problem Creating

Thursday, September 18, 6pm | Curator Jon Satrom in person! What happens when the creative roadblocks—errors, glitches, accidents—become the building blocks in the art-making process? This program highlights artists who intentionally create problems by corrupting data, hacking signals, and manipulating the medium, often to the point of challenging its own display. Curated by new media artist and SAIC […]

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Films by Robert Breer, 1957-86

Thursday, September 11,  6pm | Restored 35mm blow-ups! Robert Breer, Fuji (1974). Image courtesy Anthology Film Archives. Joyous, restless, audacious and witty, Robert Breer’s animated films are like no others. Time and again Breer marries his playful perspective to cutting-edge techniques to create formally innovative, non-narrative films filled with humor and charm. Tonight’s program features […]

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Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind

Thursday, September 4, 6pm | John Gianvito in person! John Gianvito, Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (2007). Image courtesy of the artist. Inspired by Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind is a quietly stunning memorial to the lives of America’s radicals, rebels, and everyday freethinkers from colonial […]

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Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry

Thursday, April 24, 6pm | Daniel Barrow in person! Daniel Barrow, Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry (2008). Image courtesy of the artist. The overhead projector takes center stage in Winnipeg artist Daniel Barrow’s darkly whimsical “manual animation” performances. Layering and drawing directly on a series of Mylar transparencies, Barrow combines his projected […]

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You Don’t Remember the Time You Do: Moments in the Lives of Prisoners

Thursday, April 17, 6pm | Laurie Jo Reynolds in person! Prison has long been a popular setting for motion pictures, from the oft-remade Man in the Iron Mask to recent Oscar-nominated hits Dead Man Walking and The Shawshank Redemption. Rarer is the film that examines the prison system’s complicated impact on individuals, families, and communities. […]

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Mock Up on Mu

Thursday, April 10, 6pm | Craig Baldwin in person! Craig Baldwin, Mock Up on Mu (2008). Image courtesy of the artist. Legendary for his rapid-fire found-footage collage films, underground filmmaker Craig Baldwin returns to the Midwest with a special sneak preview of his latest feature, Mock Up on Mu. A radically hybridized pulp-serial-spy-science-fiction-western-horror mash-up, Mu […]

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Falling Out of Time: New Documentaries from the Former Soviet Europe

Thursday, April 3, 6pm | Curators Oona Mosna and Jeremy Rigsby in person! Igor Strembitsky, Wayfarers (2005). Image courtesy of the artist. Once the home of state-sponsored social realism, the former Soviet Europe has given rise to a new breed of documentary, revising its realist tradition with the observational ambiguities and formal rigor more familiar […]

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