PROGRAM 

In this collection of works, the subjects find themselves rubbing shoulders with precarity, attempting to communicate the incommunicable. Strange dreams, imminent wars, near-death experiences, grief, loss - these specters from both Past and Future linger overhead like masses suspended in the air above us. 

Onion City Experimental Film Festival Streaming Online

Online programs will be made available for streaming the day following all In-Person competition programs. The link to view this program will be emailed to the email address used to purchase the streaming pass.

The Edge of a Hole | Kishino Takagishi | United States, 2022, 18 mins (World Festival Premiere)

Three individuals find themselves in the same strange dream in which they are haunted by an evolutionary ghost. Together, they share in each others’ real and imagined lives through an experience that begins and ends in the middle.

Heron 1954-2022 | Alexis McCrimmon | United States, 2022, 4 mins (Chicago Festival Premiere)

HERON 1954 - 2002 is a visual eulogy inspired by the phenomena of makeshift memorials and small gestures of mourning. Honoring the life of a loved one who died due to an accidental opioid overdose, the film materializes the process of overdue bereavement by invoking a fragmented presence at the periphery of the mind. The use of a scanner and 16mm film produces soft-focused images of broken glass and debris, the warped image of a man's face shifting in place, balancing between the beautiful and the grotesque. A trio of still-lifes serves as an offering to the departed in the form of his favorite brand of cigarettes, flowers, and a bronze figurine of the film's namesake, Heron. The film score blends streetscapes, sirens, mechanical whirring, and various synthesized choral textures into a lush ambient dirge.

Bezuna | Saif Alsaegh | United States, United Kingdom, 2022, 8 mins (Chicago Festival Premiere)

BEZUNA explores the complexities of fleeing a war-zone through the analysis of peripheral details. Through interweaving different narratives, the film presents the raw and broken feelings of a child and a cat whose lives will never be the same.

Five Minutes to Presence | Adam Farcus | United States, 2022, 7 mins (Chicago Festival Premiere)

This film layers found footage, guided meditation audio, and guidelines for attending protests as an investigation of how we embody direct action and resist political oppression. The piece ends with an appropriated video by physical education instructor, Khing Hnin Wai, working out to the EDM song Ampun Bang Jago by Tian Storm and Ever Slkr (which is a symbol of protest), in front of military forces during the 2021 coup d’état in Myanmar.

L’Incanto [Enchantment] | Chiara Caterina | Italy, 2021, 20 mins (Chicago Festival Premiere)

The voices of five women gradually fill the sound space of the film, weaving a pattern: a tarot card reader; a woman surviving one of the most horrific cases of sexual violence and homicide in Italy in the 1970s; a woman accused of the homicide of four people; a woman who's obsessed with the idea of death while another seeks an answer to violence through religious practice. These voices bring out, in different ways, the relationship to life through the discourse of death.

Content Warning: This program contains fast edits and strobing imagery that may negatively impact those viewers with epilepsy and other light-sensitive disorders. This program also contains descriptions of sexual violence.

Featured image from L’INCANTO [ENCHANTMENT] by Chiara Caterina.