PROGRAM 

Our lives are composed of countless encounters - conscious or unconscious. Some fall into the creases of our memory, soon after they take place. Others linger and change the ways we exist. This program presents four works that suspend particular moments in life as a means of forging significance - tracing and expanding them into spaces for reminiscence and reflection. A brief appearance, a carnival, a spiritual connection, a kinship, a coincidence. These remarkable encounters arrive and accumulate. And the story begins.

Chicago Filmmakers Firehouse Cinema

In-person screenings are held at Chicago Filmmakers firehouse cinema located at 1326 W Hollywood Ave in the Edgewater neighborhood. Please be sure to arrive 15 minutes prior to showtime and be ready to present your order confirmation number for admission. Masks are strongly recommended, but not required.

Moune Ô | Maxime Jean-Baptiste | Belgium, French Guiana, 2022, 17 mins

By presenting the festive events which escorted the projection of the film Jean Galmot, aventurier by Alain Maline, where the filmmaker’s father played a role, the images of MOUNE Ô reveal the survival of the colonial inheritance within a Western collective unconscious always marked by stereotypes. From little gestures of daily life, the resistance toward oppression comes in its own rhythm.

String Therapy | Mie Frederikke Fischer Christensen, Margaux Parillaud | Denmark, 2022, 16 mins (US Festival Premiere)

In this surreal realm, the spinning of the “thread of life” has evolved into a strange therapeutic spinning circle where the personal and bodily connections between the characters become the very machine that spins the thread. Rather than perceiving destiny as a large unfathomable matter, the characters connect it to the bodily experience of labor, birth, genetic inheritance and the spinning itself as a structure that provides the opportunity for change and transformation over time.

Kolaj | Gülce Besen Dilek | Turkey, 2022, 8 mins (US Festival Premiere)

As a girl grows up, her world starts to become more complicated. She notices lines appearing on people's faces that she hadn't noticed before. While trying to see the hidden lives in between her neighbors' facial features, her own face struggles to ignore an unwanted line from her childhood.

The Yellow Ghost | Jingyuan Luo | Germany, 2022, 18 mins (US Festival Premiere)

The film examines the contradictory life in the everyday state of emergency of the Coronavirus pandemic. The starting point for the film was my observation of a bus full of people celebrating in the summer of 2020. In exchange with a diverse group of interlocutors, I approach their different reactions to the pandemic between individual freedom and social responsibility.

Featured image from THE YELLOW GHOST by Jingyuan Luo.