NICHE APPEAL | IN-PERSON (4/6) | Onion City Experimental Film Festival
NICHE APPEAL | IN-PERSON (4/6) | Onion City Experimental Film Festival
Chicago Filmmakers (map) | Sunday 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
Extra Life (and Decay) | Stéphanie Lagarde | France/Netherlands | 2025 | 21 min | US Festival Premiere
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.
Serene Hues | Rita Tse | Canada | 2024 | 5 min | World Festival Premiere
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.
![[WE DON’T KNOW YET] WHAT A CINEMA CAN DO: Expanded Cinema | IN-PERSON (4/4) | Onion City Experimental Film Festival](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cf1850eb294fb0001c4c677/7a3dd9be-07d9-4a88-a84c-12fbe659583b/WE+DONT+KNOW+YET+2-01.png)
