Weekend Preview: 2015 Chicago Underground Film Festival

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CHICAGO – One of the funkiest and offbeat film festivals is taking place in Chicago through Sunday, May 17th, 2015. The 22nd Chicago Underground Film Festival (CUFF) showcases independent, experimental and documentary films from around the world. This year’s festival takes place all at the Logan Theatre – 2646 North Milwaukee, Chicago – and the films are augmented by nightly parties and concerts.

Official CUFF Poster
Photo credit: Chicago Underground Film Festival

Founded in 1993, The Chicago Underground Film Festival is a year-round organization dedicated to the work of film and video makers with defiantly independent visions. The full weekend schedule for CUFF is mapped out below. Prime time features and documentaries are highlighted for each of the remaining days of the festival. and you can click here for full film descriptions (including all the short films in each compilation) and for ticket purchasing information.

Friday, May 15th

”Shorts #2: Humanity I Love You”



Five short films in this program.

5/15, 6:30pm

”Shorts #3: If a Cheerfulest Elephantangelchild Should Sit”

Three shorts films in this program.
5/15, 7pm

“‘Speculation Nation”

Speculation Nation
Photo credit: Chicago Underground Film Festival

Documentary. USA/Spain. Filmmakers Bill Brown and Sabine Gruffat travel across Spain to document the consequences of the housing crisis. What they find are Spanish citizens to document the consequences of the housing crisis…“Along the way, the filmmakers visit young mothers and their families squatting in failed condo developments; intentional communities of mountain cave dwellers; protest campsites that have sprung up in front of bank branches; and empty apartment buildings transformed into experiments in Utopian living.” – Bill Brown and Sabine Gruffat

5/15, 8:30pm

”Shorts #4: Luminous Tendril of Celestial Wish”

Seven short films in this program

5/15, 9pm

Saturday, May 16th

”Shorts #5: One’s Not Half Two. It’s Two are Halves of One”

Five short films in this program.

5/16, 2pm

”Shorts #6: The Great Advantage of Being Alive”

Five short films in this program.

5/16, 3pm

”IMMUNE!”

Feature Film. USA. Directed by Ryan Scammell

5/16, 4pm

”Shorts #7: A Clown’s Smirk in the Skull of a Baboon”

Three shorts films in this program.

5/16, 5pm

“‘Sailing a Sinking Sea”

Documentary. USA. Directed by Olivia Wyatt

5/16, 6pm

”Shorts #8: What a Proud Dreamhorse Pulling (Smoothingly) Through”

Eleven short films in this program

5/16, 7pm

“For the Plasma”

For the Plasma
Photo credit: Chicago Underground Film Festival

Feature Film. USA. “A digital-pastoral drama of friendship, landscape and technology, ‘For the Plasma’ begins as the story of two young women (Anabelle LeMieux and Rosalie Lowe) employed as forest-fire lookouts in Northern Maine, and ends in a hundred places at once. Along the way, the girls make financial predictions based on surveillance footage of the surrounding forest, the local lighthouse keeper and a pair of unusual investors interrupt their solitude, and a dreamlike portrait of small town America and contemporary life is revealed. For the Plasma is a film of minimal means but ambition, shot in Super 16mm and 4:3 with a small cast and crew, and scored by the great Japanese experimental composer, Keiichi Suzuki.” – Directors Bingham Bryant & Kyle Molzan

5/16, 8pm

Dirty Looks Presents ”Hardcore Home Movies”

Seven short films in this program. Curated by Bradford Nordeen.

5/16, 9pm

”Shorts #8: When Serpents Bargain for the Right to Squirm”

Four short films in this program.

5/16, 10pm