OUR HEAVENLY BODIES - PICTURE RESTART 16MM SERIES | IN-PERSON (6/21)
OUR HEAVENLY BODIES - PICTURE RESTART 16MM SERIES | IN-PERSON (6/21)
Chicago Filmmakers (map) | Saturday June 21, 2025 | 6:00PM
For our sixth installment of Picture Restart, and in celebration of Pride Month, we are brushing off some expressly queer films from the Picture Start Collection, exploring the feeling of finding our other halves in public. The program is anchored by a pair of parade documentaries twenty years apart, each presenting a reflection of the other across time. But the pairing doesn’t stop there - NIGHTLIVES explores the process of preparing for a date, wondering whether the one you’ll meet will be a good fit. And Karen Aqua’s HEAVENLY BODIES feels like a pair of Keith Haring figures come to life. And just imagine if the creators of Schoolhouse Rock made an animated gay comedy short, and then celebrate because this is actually the film that opens our program, QUEERDOM, in which a man wakes up one morning to discover that he “feels a little queer”. Each of these films is characterized by a deep yearning for connection in public with the ones who make us feel truly complete.
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Lineup:
1. QUEERDOM - 1978, Paul Kim & Lew Gifford, 8m
A man wakes up to a perfect day with a strange feeling he can’t explain: today he feels a little queer. We follow him through a series of encounters that make his day to day suddenly come to life as he opens himself up to loving men and the dynamic possibilities of gender. A surreal, super-gay odyssey, with endless quotables, animated by the creators of Schoolhouse Rock and the Trix Rabbit.
2. HEAVENLY BODIES - 1980, Karen Aqua, 4m
A wordless reverie of two stars falling from the heavens, only to become humans intertwined in sensuous and abstract ways, bodies morphing into each other, and back into stars in an extended loop of Love’s perpetual return.
3. NIGHTLIVES - 1985, Eileen Nelson, 6m
As we watch the rituals of preparation for a hopeful date - makeup, outfit, hair, all of the details coming together - we only ever see small parts of our main characters themselves. Finally the moment arrives, the doorbell rings, and we get to see if there’s a connection or not.
4. ARISTOPHANES ON BROADWAY - 1991, Zack Stiglicz, 9m
The participants of Chicago’s 1991 Pride Parade are viewed in a high contrast color negative, making for a surreal journey into an inverted world. On the voiceover, the filmmaker Zack Stiglicz ruminates on the story that appears in Plato’s Symposium (or Hedwig and the Angry Inch) that tells of an original human form outside of gender, falling to earth and splintering in all these beautiful ways, producing people drawn to each other perpetually, the very source of yearning for our other halves.
5. PARADE - 1972, Ronald Chase, 13m
This essential documentary of the 1972 San Francisco Pride Parade - over only a few blocks and a few dozen participants - was believed to be lost for almost 50 years before the director was able to restore it from preprint materials. This, however, is a resurfaced original print, turned up in the Picture Start Collection, unplayed on film in 40 years. It features vulnerable interviews with a dozen different participants, reflecting on their hopes for a dawning new era of acceptance.
Total Runtime: 40m