Chicago – It’s five times the fun for the fifth time. Filmmaker Jack C. Newell and Rebecca Fons of the Gene Siskel Film Center will conduct their 5th “Destroy Your Art” event. The idea is a filmmaker creates a film, shows it once to the audience, and then destroys it forever. This will take place this year at the historic Music Box Theatre on Tuesday, September 26th, 2023. For more information, including tickets, click Dya.
“Destroy Your Art” will feature four filmmakers – Ariella Khan, Michael Glover Smith, Ines Sommer, and Blair St. George Wright – as they show their short films. After that One Showing, the films will be destroyed forever (last year it was a controlled blowtorch flame) never to be seen again. The concept challenges the notions of permanency, images, expression and our perception of what time/space means. Audience participants, and the filmmakers themselves, will be the only witnesses to the final products,...
“Destroy Your Art” will feature four filmmakers – Ariella Khan, Michael Glover Smith, Ines Sommer, and Blair St. George Wright – as they show their short films. After that One Showing, the films will be destroyed forever (last year it was a controlled blowtorch flame) never to be seen again. The concept challenges the notions of permanency, images, expression and our perception of what time/space means. Audience participants, and the filmmakers themselves, will be the only witnesses to the final products,...
- 9/26/2023
- by adam@hollywoodchicago.com (Adam Fendelman)
- HollywoodChicago.com
This is Part Three in a series about Chicago’s Experimental Film Coalition; and covers their annual experimental film festival. You can read Part One here and Part Two here.
In addition to their monthly screenings, the Coalition founded what was initially called either the Festival of Experimental Film or the Experimental Film Festival. The first one was most likely in 1984. By 1987 it was called the Onion City Film Festival, which it has been called ever since. The Coalition ran Onion City annually until 2001 when it was taken over by Chicago Filmmakers, and continues to run to this day.
1984
Of the first Experimental Film Festival, the dates it ran and the exact list of films that screened are not known as of this writing. However, filmmaker Paul Glabicki lists that his film, Film-Wipe-Film won a Jury Award.
1985
For the second Experimental Film Festival, again the dates and films screened are not known.
In addition to their monthly screenings, the Coalition founded what was initially called either the Festival of Experimental Film or the Experimental Film Festival. The first one was most likely in 1984. By 1987 it was called the Onion City Film Festival, which it has been called ever since. The Coalition ran Onion City annually until 2001 when it was taken over by Chicago Filmmakers, and continues to run to this day.
1984
Of the first Experimental Film Festival, the dates it ran and the exact list of films that screened are not known as of this writing. However, filmmaker Paul Glabicki lists that his film, Film-Wipe-Film won a Jury Award.
1985
For the second Experimental Film Festival, again the dates and films screened are not known.
- 12/31/2017
- by Mike Everleth
- Underground Film Journal
It’s been a surprisingly interesting month of moving and shaking in terms of doc development. Just a month after making his first public funding pitch at Toronto’s Hot Docs Forum, legendary doc filmmaker Frederick Wiseman took to Kickstarter to help cover the remaining expenses for his 40th feature film In Jackson Heights (see the film’s first trailer below). Unrelentingly rigorous in his determination to capture the American institutional landscape on film, his latest continues down this thematic rabbit hole, taking on the immensely diverse New York City neighborhood of Jackson Heights as his latest subject. According to the Kickstarter page, Wiseman is currently editing the 120 hours of rushes he shot with hopes of having the film ready for a fall festival premiere (my guess would be Tiff, where both National Gallery and At Berkeley made their North American debut), though he’s currently quite a ways away from his $75,000 goal.
- 7/6/2015
- by Jordan M. Smith
- IONCINEMA.com
Well folks, after a rather long and brutal winter (at least for me here in Buffalo), we are finally heading into the wonderful warmth of summer, but with that blast of sunshine and steamy humidity comes the mid-year drought of major film fests. After the Sheffield Doc/Fest concludes on June 10th and AFI Docs wraps on June 21st, we likely won’t see any major influx in our charts until Locarno, Venice, Telluride and Tiff announce their line-ups in rapid succession. In the meantime, we can look forward to the intriguing onslaught of films making their debut in Sheffield, including Brian Hill’s intriguing examination of Sweden’s most notorious serial killer, The Confessions of Thomas Quick, and Sean McAllister’s film for which he himself was jailed in the process of making, A Syrian Love Story, the only two films world premiering in the festival’s main competition.
- 6/1/2015
- by Jordan M. Smith
- IONCINEMA.com
Held earlier this month on May 13-17, the epic 22nd annual Chicago Underground Film Festival gave out eight awards and six honorable mentions.
The big winner was Jennifer Reeder who took home this year’s Best of the Fest award for Blood Below the Skin, a 38-minute short film about three teenage girls who forge a special bond in the wake of an unanticipated incident. This marks back-to-back wins for Reeder who won the Best Short Award last year at Cuff for her previous film A Million Miles Away.
Other winners include Iva Radivojevic’s rumination on asylum seekers in Cyprus, Evaporating Borders, which won Best Feature; while David McMurry’s meditation on the world’s first nuclear town, Arco, Idaho, Atomic City, won Best Documentary. Also, ethnographic documentarian Ben Russell won the Poseidon’s Trident Award for Experimental Mythologies for Atlantis; and Laura Harrison’s animated The Lingerie Show...
The big winner was Jennifer Reeder who took home this year’s Best of the Fest award for Blood Below the Skin, a 38-minute short film about three teenage girls who forge a special bond in the wake of an unanticipated incident. This marks back-to-back wins for Reeder who won the Best Short Award last year at Cuff for her previous film A Million Miles Away.
Other winners include Iva Radivojevic’s rumination on asylum seekers in Cyprus, Evaporating Borders, which won Best Feature; while David McMurry’s meditation on the world’s first nuclear town, Arco, Idaho, Atomic City, won Best Documentary. Also, ethnographic documentarian Ben Russell won the Poseidon’s Trident Award for Experimental Mythologies for Atlantis; and Laura Harrison’s animated The Lingerie Show...
- 5/26/2015
- by Mike Everleth
- Underground Film Journal
It should come as no surprise that Cannes Film Festival will play host to Kent Jones’s doc on the touchstone of filmmaking interview tomes, Hitchcock/Truffaut (see photo above). The film has been floating near the top of this list since it was announced last year as in development, while Jones himself has a history with the festival, having co-written both Arnaud Desplechin’s Jimmy P. and Martin Scorsese’s My Voyage To Italy, both of which premiered in Cannes. The film is scheduled to screen as part of the Cannes Classics sidebar alongside the likes of Stig Björkman’s Ingrid Bergman, in Her Own Words, which will play as part of the festival’s tribute to the late starlet, and Gabriel Clarke and John McKenna’s Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans (see trailer below). As someone who grew up watching road races with my dad in Watkins Glen,...
- 5/1/2015
- by Jordan M. Smith
- IONCINEMA.com
Now that the busy winter fest schedule of Sundance, Rotterdam and the Berlinale has concluded, we’ve now got our eyes on the likes of True/False and SXSW. While, True/False does not specialize in attention grabbing world premieres, it does provide a late winter haven for cream of the crop non-fiction fare from all the previously mentioned fests and a selection of overlooked genre blending films presented in a down home setting. This year will mark my first trip to the Columbia, Missouri based fest, where I hope to catch a little of everything, from their hush-hush secret screenings, to selections from their Neither/Nor series, this year featuring chimeric Polish cinema of decades past, to a spotlight of Adam Curtis’s incisive oeuvre. But truth be told, it is SXSW, with its slew of high profile world premieres being announced, such as Alex Gibney’s Steve Jobs...
- 2/27/2015
- by Jordan M. Smith
- IONCINEMA.com
In the decade since the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, discussion of torture has been widespread, but one issue has been largely overlooked: what happens to people after they have been tortured? How does it affect them over the years and decades to follow? Kathy Berger and Ines Sommer’s challenging film Beneath the Blindfold meets survivors and lets us hear their stories. It’s Kathy’s cinematic début and we asked her how the idea came about.
Remembering what happened.
“We began this film really back in 2006, 2007,” she says. “For both my co-director Ines and I it was really in response to the abuse scandals at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. We were horrified by how the mainstream media treated it with obfuscation and a series of euphemisms like ‘enhanced interrogation’. l knew a centre in Chicago, where we live, that treats survivors of torture. There are about 30 of them around the United.
Remembering what happened.
“We began this film really back in 2006, 2007,” she says. “For both my co-director Ines and I it was really in response to the abuse scandals at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. We were horrified by how the mainstream media treated it with obfuscation and a series of euphemisms like ‘enhanced interrogation’. l knew a centre in Chicago, where we live, that treats survivors of torture. There are about 30 of them around the United.
- 10/11/2014
- by Jennie Kermode
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
IMDb.com, Inc. takes no responsibility for the content or accuracy of the above news articles, Tweets, or blog posts. This content is published for the entertainment of our users only. The news articles, Tweets, and blog posts do not represent IMDb's opinions nor can we guarantee that the reporting therein is completely factual. Please visit the source responsible for the item in question to report any concerns you may have regarding content or accuracy.