Competition Shows:

IS THIS THING ON? | April 4, 2025 - 6pm

Tune into Onion City’s sonic program and ask IS THIS THING ON? as ghosts of phone calls, 2000s music videos, and the experimental avant-garde are amplified into a choppy present. The works in this program experiment with falling tones, garbled transmissions, graphic scores, and popping optical tracks. Filmic motion is tempered to the stutters of aural anticipation, harnessing the intensive power of sound in its breakdowns and absences.

TAILWIND | April 5, 2025 - 2pm

Pack the trunk and we are hitting the road, baby! This program is a collection of roadtrip memories, travelogues, family movies, and film diaries. There’s a revisit of a historic journey, a daydream in a parking lot, and—remember the solar eclipse last year that passed through the Midwest right after Onion City, on April 8? Filmmakers were not going to miss that good opportunity to make films. They are the star chasers, and their cameras, as we shall say with Jonas Mekas, “The camera is always running!”

VIVID DETAIL | April 5, 2025 - 4pm

See through new eyes in VIVID DETAIL with works that explore the outer reaches of mind-body experience under conditions of heightened awareness and temporal contraction. The films in this program chart the visceral potential of augmented perception brought on by medical interventions, brushes with death, and erotic encounter.

FUGUE STATES | April 5, 2025 - 9pm

The Onion City late night program returns once again this year as FUGUE STATES, a lineup of works that embrace spells of confusion, somnambulant visions, and twists of memory. Each work in this program plays with speculation and suspense, mapping uneven nodes in an overall warped sense of humor that unfurls to reveal bizarre and sorrowful kernels of truth.

(RE)VISITATIONS | April 6, 2025 - 3pm

Double back for (RE)VISITATIONS, a program centered on visits, returns, ancestry, and lineage. The works in this program take up a number of experimental documentary approaches in order to visit upon recovered footage and canonical film, loved ones and photo shoots, letters and graves.

NICHE APPEAL | April 6, 2025 - 5pm

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.