Looking back, navel-gazing, when we age and change and learn that attaining wisdom from growth and perseverance is beautifully painful. THE WISDOM TOOTH is a collection of the hard ways, an assembly of poetic, contemplative, and courageous shorts that reflect kinship, identity building, and familial or social relations. A documentary on retrieving the memory-image of a distant father—and avid video maker, a voyeuristic video diary on and about oneself, an honest portrait of trust, belonging, and togetherness, a moment to fall into the questions of what-ifs and would-haves, these bittersweet shorts come together as a program that brims with full-bodied memories.

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Chicago Filmmakers does not deny admission to those who do not have the ability to make a donation. Please email coop [at] chicagofilmmakers.org to inquire about free admission.

MAPA DENTAL (DENTAL MAP) | Camila de Lucas | Spain | 2023 | 5 Mins

Teeth can give us a lot of information about the human body but they can also be our worst enemy, creating cognitive dissonance by storing the past, present and future and building our identity.

sebastian_1 | Alex Lo, Sebastian Smith | Canada | 2024 | 14 Mins

Shot on an action-cam in a self-surveillance style, Sebastian archives his week as he reflects on his mental state for the past decade.

Parasite Family* | Prapat Jiwarangsan | Thailand | 2022 | 5 Mins

Constructed from film negatives discovered in an out-of-business film lab the film traces a journey from analog to digital, to the world of AI-generated images. These faces represent a certain kind of family that is parasitic on Thai society, the kind of families and institutions that absorb wealth and power, gradually evolving into a new species of monsters.

*In-Person Screening Only

Say Something | Agustina Aranda | USA | 2023 | 10 Mins

A short experimental documentary exploring filmmaker Katie Agustina Aranda’s relationship with her father, Panfilo Aranda – a Paraguayan immigrant, workaholic, and amateur videographer. Using material that he shot throughout the last forty years, archival footage, and interviews, the story follows his journey from passionate filmmaker to distant father.

I Would’ve Been Happy | Jordan Wong | USA | 2023 | 9 Mins

An attempt to map a fraught relationship through the use of intricately coded pictographs and schematic abstractions applied onto glazed ceramic tiles and quilted cyanotype fabric. The aesthetics of architectural language are used to reconstruct memories of the filmmaker’s family’s domestic spaces in the hope to uncover logic or reason to a broken home.

Бабушка Галя и Дедушка Аркадий // Grandma Galya and Grandpa Arkadiy | Anna Kipervaser | Ukraine, USA | 2023 | 5 Mins

A jovial and dreamy rumination on love, time passing, what we collect, what we hold on to, and how we maintain connection to home, to ourselves.

in the interval | æryka jourdaine hollis o’neil | USA | 2022 | 24 Mins

Both an intimate family portrait and a cinematic collage of Black and trans collective memory and (be)longing, meditating on themes of safety, bodily autonomy and generations of compounding loss across time and media.

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Tags: Agustina Aranda, Alex Lo, Andersonville, Anna Kipervaser, æryka jourdaine hollis o'neil, Camila de Lucas, Chicago, Chicago Filmmakers, Jordan Wong, OCFF 2024: THE WISDOM TOOTH, Onion City Experimental Film Festival, Prapat Jiwarangsan, Sebastian Smith, THE WISDOM TOOTH