33rd Chicago Underground Film Festival
@ Chicago
Gene Siskel Film Center and the Harper Theater
On view through Sunday, September 27th
The Chicago Underground Film Festival (CUFF) announces the lineup for its 33rd edition, which runs September 23–27 at the Gene Siskel Film Center and the Harper Theater. The program presents more than 100 films from 22 countries, including four World Premieres and major new works from internationally acclaimed and emerging filmmakers. Selected from a record 2,904 submissions representing filmmakers from 100 countries and territories, the 2026 program is one of the most internationally diverse and formally ambitious lineups in the festival’s history.
CUFF33 opens Wednesday, September 23 at the Gene Siskel Film Center with the Midwest Premiere of NOVA ’78, directed by Aaron Brookner and Rodrigo Areias. Drawn from the long-lost archive of filmmaker Howard Brookner and painstakingly restored over more than a decade, the film resurrects the legendary 1978 Nova Convention, an unprecedented gathering where dozens of artists, musicians, poets and filmmakers including William S. Burroughs, Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, Frank Zappa, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Glass, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Anne Waldman and Timothy Leary converged for three extraordinary days in New York’s East Village. More than a historical document, NOVA ’78 captures underground culture inventing itself in real time, preserving a moment when literature, music, performance, experimental film, and radical thought collided to redefine the possibilities of contemporary art.
The festival concludes Sunday, September 27 at the Gene Siskel Film Center with the World Premiere of A Stranger Has No Eyes, the extraordinary new documentary from C. S. Nicholson, whose acclaimed short The Discoverer of the Discoverers screened at CUFF30. Set in contemporary Benin, the film follows Martine de Souza, a descendant of one of history’s most notorious slave traders, as she publicly confronts her family’s legacy while navigating inherited power, contested land rights, and the enduring consequences of colonialism. Structured through mesmerizing Vodun possession ceremonies in which ancestors and the enslaved return through the living, the film transforms history into lived experience, collapsing past and present into a haunting meditation on memory, justice and spiritual survival.
Full schedule here
Official Website
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Tags: 32nd Chicago Underground Film Festival, Chicago, Gene Siskel Film Center, The Harper Theater
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