IS THIS THING ON?
@ Chicago Filmmakers
1326 W Hollywood Ave, Chicago, IL 60660
Opening Friday, April 4th, at 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.
Content Warning: flashing light, nudity, some loud noise experiments
Tidal | V. A. Doch | UK | 2024 | 10 min | US Festival Premiere
Poppy, a woman working as both a night cleaner and phone sex operator in London, delivers a hazy soliloquy that drifts over the imagined female form and murkily passes through the nocturnal spaces to which she tends.
if you seek amy | Ela Kazdal | UK/Turkey | 2025 | 2 min | US Festival Premiere
Combining 16mm and 35mm film, vinyl stickers, photograms, and lace, the filmmaker prints a strange remix of 2000s music videos that threaten to overtake their subjects by filmstrip a la Tscherkassky’s seminal Outer Space (1999).
Um Tropeço em Cinco Movimentos (A Slippage in Five Movements) | Valentina Rosset | Brazil/US | 15 min | Chicago Festival Premiere
In a stunning enactment of Toru Takemitsu’s 1962 graphic score “Corona: For Pianist(s),” 16mm and Super 8 shots form a landscape film that studies the intricate topography of piano and player as attentively as it observes swaying fields and shimmering waters.
Noise to Signal | Guan Huang | China | 2024 | 2 min | World Festival Premiere
Zoomed DV video pixelation and falling tones explore the visual and auditory connotations of “noise” as they relate to our understanding of dimensional space.
Bounded Intimacy | Ayanna Dozier | US | 2024 | 6 min | Chicago Festival Premiere
An inscrutable and silent glimpse of a New York City sex worker, at once voyeuristic and somehow familiar, as she walks the street and seduces the camera.
WE DON’T TALK LIKE WE USED TO | Joshua Gen Solondz | US | 2023 | 36 min | Chicago Festival Premiere
“Part travelogue, part affective almanac, and part cinematic noise show,” this haptic feedback loop presents six years’ compilation of travel diary and solarized fragments. The film poetically lingers on homeland, pollution, fatherhood, and human connection across Hong Kong, New Hampshire, Japan, and Brooklyn.
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Tags: Andersonville, Ayanna Dozier, Chicago, Chicago Filmmakers, Ela Kazdal, Guan Huang, Joshua Gen Solondz, Onion City Experimental Film Festival, V. A. Doch, Valentina Rosset
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