2025 Program

SEA 404 (2019, Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu, 3 min.) — 16mm

RUN! (2019, Malic Amalya, 10 min.) — 16mm

On Another Note (2019, Saul Levine, 5 min.) — 16mm

Jardin du sel (2011, Rose Lowder, 16 min.) — 16mm

Obey Your Air Raid Warden (1942, Robert Davis & Harry Hilfinger, 3 min.) — 16mm

La Grande Dame (étude) (2005/2011, Alexandre Larose, 3 min.) — 35mm

Thread (2023, Abigail Smith, 2 min.) — 35mm

June (2012, Leopoldo Bloom, 6 min.) — 35mm

The Exquisite Corpus (2015, Peter Tscherkassky, 19 min.) — 35mm

Runtime: Approx. 90 minutes

Film has proven such a remarkably durable medium for artists that in recent years it’s started to feel like “film is dead” is finally becoming a minority opinion again. We’ve only been able to get to this point through the efforts of artists who have demonstrated analog cinema’s viability by continuing to make work on film, and the growing network of analog exhibitors and community-driven skill sharing initiatives that have supported them. While the films in this program take a diverse set of artistic approaches, all of the artists behind them share a stubborn unwillingness to just let film go. Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu’s SEA 404 is perhaps the grainiest film we’ve ever seen, a shimmering procession of greyscale abstractions, with a howler of a punchline for the medium specificists. Known for his bombastic approach to found footage filmmaking, Peter Tscherkassky reengineers scraps of vintage pornography into a visceral, psychosexual nightmare mosaic in The Exquisite Corpus. One of two films in this program made by a filmmaker in their 70s, Saul Levine’s On Another Note is a pleasantly nagging, amicably confusing late entry in his career-long practice of scribing personal notes in celluloid. The other featured septuagenarian here is Rose Lowder with Jardin du sel, a technical one-off that counts as Lowder’s only film to date shot on reversal stock, as well as one of the very last films shot on commercially processed Kodachrome.

Obey Your Air Raid Warden was preserved by Chicago Film Archives in 2024, thanks to a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation.

The following works will screen in tandem with an interactive workshop on projector light sources, lenses, and optics conducted by Julian Antos of the Chicago Film Society and Justin Dennis of Kinora:

Castle One (1966, Malcolm Le Grice, 18 min.) — 16mm w/ light bulb

Anna (2024–2025, Chae Yu, 15 min.) — artist-operated 16mm

Runtime: Approx. 90 minutes

At CFS, we spend a lot of time talking about the film prints we show, their history as physical objects, and characteristics inherent to the way they were produced. Equally important are the light sources that illuminate them, and the optics which make them visible to the human eye. This interactive workshop will focus on projector light sources — both historical and those still in use today — projection lenses and other optics, and other variables that affect how light travels to a cinema screen.

Also included in this program are two expanded cinema works which creatively redirect the flow of light as it moves beyond the film gate and towards the screen. Mostly assembled from scrapped commercial 16mm audiovisual materials, Malcolm Le Grice’s Castle One features a unique presentation apparatus designed to maximally disrupt its own projection: a bare light bulb is hung in front of the screen for the duration of the film and periodically turned on and off, effectively nullifying the image with every flash. In her performance piece Anna, Chae Yu guides a modified anamorphic compression lens through a set of optical choreographies. With every twisting, repositioning, and resettling movement, clusters of luminance disperse, shapes divide or multiply themselves, blotches of color cohere into patches of light, or dissemble back into dimness, all of this set to the clanging accompaniment of the projector’s own amplified innards.

Assets (2025, Christine Lucy Latimer, 2 min.) — 16mm

Nightwalker (2022, Ayanna Dozier, 7 min.) — 16mm

Limited Sight Distance (2016, Curt Heiner, 5 min.) — 16mm

Damage Control (Bullwinkle film) (2010, Adam Paradis, 4 min.) — 16mm

Flowers for an Old Shrine (2025, Long Pham, 6 min.) — 16mm

The Last Train (2016, Dianna Barrie & Richard Tuohy, 12 min.) — 16mm

Zero Length Spring (2021, Ross Meckfessel, 16 min.) — 16mm

Revolving Rounds (2024, Johann Lurf & Christina Jauernik, 11 min.) — 35mm

Runtime: Approx. 90 minutes

While a significant number of the screenings we’ve presented across the three Celluloid Now editions to date have not followed a specific theme, throughlines often assert themselves, connecting films made under totally different circumstances with totally different aims. For the films in this program, the bonding agent is a unique, spectral strangeness tethered to the acts of shooting and projecting film. In a series of lengthy, observational takes, Ayanna Dozier’s Nightwalker distills its titular occupation to the very act in its name, constantly moving with its main character as she hustles ever-forward through the night. Adam Paradis’s Damage Control slices, dices, scrambles, and repeats a ten second sequence originally used in the hit animated television program Rocky and His Friends, transforming moose and squirrel alike into flicker film icons. Perhaps the most perverted object in all of Celluloid Now this year, Christine Lucy Latimer’s Assets flagrantly discards celluloid’s indexicality in favor of a kitschy simulation, a visual stack of hundreds of chintzy, digital “film” filters placed on top of one another, which Latimer prints to 16mm Ektachrome reversal stock and processes herself in a triumphant moment of reification for film. Beginning with a slow, gliding shot across a field, Johann Lurf and Christina Jauernik’s Revolving Rounds travels forward with steady purpose, moving through strange agricultural spaces, observing strange projection equipment, taking a few metaphysical twists and turns, and getting enmeshed in what appears to be the silver halides in the universe’s film emulsion.

1998 (2002, Sungsuk Suk, 5 min.) — 16mm

The Dark Room (2001, Minyong Jang, 5 min.) — 16mm

The Breath (2007, Minyong Jang, 10 min.) — 16mm

Tide (2007, Jang Eunju, 8 min.) — 16mm

Footage (2015, Minjung Kim, 3 min.) — 16mm

(100ft) (2016, Minjung Kim, 3 min.) — 16mm

Count Footage (2016, Minjung Kim, 3 min.) — 16mm

Study for Three Streams (silent version) (2024, Park Kyujae, 5 min.) — 16mm

Chang Gyeong (2024, Jangwook Lee, 17 min.) — 16mm

Runtime: Approx. 60 minutes

For most of the commercial film industry, the “digital transition” was treated as a foregone conclusion. This trajectory hasn’t been quite so clean when it comes to independent film artists. The 21st century has witnessed the rise of small, cooperatively run film labs, and dedicated showcases for working artists still exhibiting on film (like Celluloid Now). Korean artists have been making experimental films since at least the 1960s, but for the last twenty years especially, Seoul has been home to one of the most exciting analog filmmaking scenes in the entire world. The Experimental Film & Video Festival in Seoul (widely known as EXiS) was founded in 2004, significantly expanding exhibition opportunities for artists in the city and bringing their work into conversation with the greater international film community. The same year, filmmaker Jangwook Lee opened Space Cell, a site initially designed to accommodate experimental filmmaking workshops and related screenings, which expanded in 2006 to include an artist-run film lab. These developments have been transformative for film in Seoul, providing the spaces necessary for a community to form around analog filmmaking and facilitating access to the resources necessary for artists to learn, exercise, and share related technical skills. This program brings together a sampler of 16mm films by Korean filmmakers made across this still-young century, illustrating how each wave of young artists in this scene has benefitted from the work of their analog predecessors, and subsequently built upon this foundation for the benefit of the next generation. This isn’t to say this is a homogenous group of artists. Each of these six filmmakers has developed a unique sensibility, spanning structuralist one-liners, austere narrative tableaus, and several different and distinct flavors of visual abstraction. Considered individually, every filmmaker here is an immense talent in their own right. Taken collectively, they’re even better.

Co-programmed by Chae Yu.

Mounds Above the Earth (2025, Jiayi Chen, 7 min.) — 16mm/35mm

Green Today [fragment] (2025, Cameron Worden, 3 min.) — 35mm

Shed (2024, josh brainin, 7 min.) — 35mm

Olympic Order (2025, Kioto Aoki, 15 min.) — 16mm

Camera Roll 3 (2018-2022) (2023, Charles Cadkin, 3 min.) — 16mm

Color Negative (2023, Sara Sowell, 6 min.) — 16mm

Paloniya (2024, Ashley Dequilla, 3 min.) — 16mm

Guarita (2025, Lua Borges, 3 min.) — 16mm

Home without organs (2025, Yao Song & Zihan Mo, 2 min.) — 16mm

cloud film (2024, Tristen Ives, 11 min.) — 16mm

GD2 (2021, Julian Antos, 11 min.) — 16mm

Giddy Up Cowboy (2024, Justin Dean, 2 min.) — 16mm

Microbudget (2025, Ben Creech) – 16mm *Installation*

Runtime: Approx. 90 minutes

Since the first Celluloid Now in 2022, we’ve seen an explosion of activity around analog cinema among young filmmakers. While it has been heartening to see new artists embrace film on an international scale, we’re especially excited that in recent years, Chicago has quietly fostered a sizable and immensely talented pool of analog filmmakers. For this edition of Celluloid Now, we’re closing with a selection of works made by filmmakers we’re claiming for the city of Chicago, all of whom are under 40 years of age. Some filmmakers featured here will be screening their work publicly on film for the very first time. Others have already built impressive analog corpuses and screened in multiple Celluloid Now programs. (Chicago Film Society has also hosted recent “Celluloid Now Presents” solo programs for Kioto Aoki and Sara Sowell.) The artists in this program come from a diverse set of backgrounds and artistic traditions, and the array of technical and creative approaches they take speaks to just how flexible the medium of film is. As evidenced by Julian Antos’s GD2, photochemical A-and-B-roll traditionalism is still very much alive, but the recent popularity of affordable “direct positive” digital-to-film printing has made possible work like josh brainin’s Shed, which condenses an unnerving accretion of selfies, surgery photos, and phone conversations into a dissonant soup of abstract analog and digital textures. Eschewing commercial labwork altogether, Tristen Ives opted to process the exhibition print for cloud film themself, a decision which contributes significantly to the film’s unique look. Other films here feature DIY computer graphics, optically printed effects work, and simultaneous 16mm and 35mm projection. These examples only hint at the panoply of creative approaches taken by the artists in this program, whose collective work has made Chicago our favorite city for film in the entire world.