Film & Video Programming
Employees Only Cineclub + The Neu Lithium
88:88 + QUANTITY CINEMA
April 13, 2026 – 7pm
FACETS, Chicago
Employees Only Cineclub Edition 12
Join us for a retrospective screening of Isiah Medina’s debut feature 88:88 (2015), a landmark of the contemporary avant-garde, alongside short works by Alexandre Galmard, Kelley Dong, and Isaac Goes of Quantity Cinema. Isiah Medina in attendance.
When one is unable to pay one’s bills, the electricity is cut. Once one can pay again, the digital appliances flash 88:88. While philosophical systems begin with the concept of nothing as a starting point for thinking, Isiah Medina’s film uses “88:88” as a marker of the nothing of poverty and the possibility of counting life anew. Medina’s film cuts together instances in the lives of friends and their experiences in love, science, art, and politics (the four conditions that make up the essence of Philosophy according to French theorist Alain Badiou, whose writings figure prominently into the film via textual recitations) in order to see their lives outside of narrative, and to show thinking is always both possible and necessary. This is a screening intended to celebrate the film’s 10 year anniversary. The director will be in attendance for a post-screening Q&A, on the occasion of his coming to Chicago to premiere his fifth feature, GANGSTERISM (2025), at the Onion City Experimental Film Festival.
The film will be preceded by a frenetic array of short films—eleven of which will play out in a scant seven minutes—from Alexandre Galmard, Kelley Dong, and Isaac Goes, three filmmakers, friends, and frequent collaborators aligned with Isiah Medina’s production company, Quantity Cinema. These are lithe lashings of style—vaporous and damn-near smoked out forays into digital primitivism and video diary—that orbit the outermost edges of cinema. They will be presented chronologically and continuously.
“His is instead a cinema of the cut, of difference, of reconsidering every assumption of more than a century’s worth of filmmaking. […] I could say that 88:88 is a masterpiece but masterpieces are a term of the past; Medina has taken his first step into the future.” Phil Coldiron, Cinema Scope Magazine
“I am astounded. We mathematicians or philosophers speak so much about multiplicities, overlapping, ramifications, etc. and it is just beautiful to see all the concepts at work, with admirable visual force. The cuts, continuities, off-voices, silences, the very real superpositions of multiplicities, produce a new opening of our minds and sensibilities.” – Fernando Zalamea, mathematician and philosopher, author of “Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics”
PROGRAM
director of operations (Alexandre Galmard, 2013, 0:59)
x’s of me (Alexandre Galmard, 2013, 1:15)
jeunes ascensions (Alexandre Galmard, 2014, 1:06)
young street (Alexandre Galmard, 2015, 0:40)
red is blue (Alexandre Galmard, 2016, 0:22)
Breaking and Entering (Kelley Dong, 2017, 1:28)
Late Embryo (Kelley Dong, 2017, 0:11)
Via D7 (Alexandre Galmard, 2019, 0:56)
Shooting Star Summer Solstice (Kelley Dong, 2019, 0:18)
Pears (Kelley Dong, 2020, 0:01)
Worlds (Isaac Goes, 2021, 19:14)
Two Dogs (Kelley Dong, 2022, 0:20)
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88:88 (Isiah Medina, 2015, 01:05:00)
April 13, 2026 – 7pm
FACETS, Chicago
Employees Only Cineclub Edition 12
Join us for a retrospective screening of Isiah Medina’s debut feature 88:88 (2015), a landmark of the contemporary avant-garde, alongside short works by Alexandre Galmard, Kelley Dong, and Isaac Goes of Quantity Cinema. Isiah Medina in attendance.
When one is unable to pay one’s bills, the electricity is cut. Once one can pay again, the digital appliances flash 88:88. While philosophical systems begin with the concept of nothing as a starting point for thinking, Isiah Medina’s film uses “88:88” as a marker of the nothing of poverty and the possibility of counting life anew. Medina’s film cuts together instances in the lives of friends and their experiences in love, science, art, and politics (the four conditions that make up the essence of Philosophy according to French theorist Alain Badiou, whose writings figure prominently into the film via textual recitations) in order to see their lives outside of narrative, and to show thinking is always both possible and necessary. This is a screening intended to celebrate the film’s 10 year anniversary. The director will be in attendance for a post-screening Q&A, on the occasion of his coming to Chicago to premiere his fifth feature, GANGSTERISM (2025), at the Onion City Experimental Film Festival.
The film will be preceded by a frenetic array of short films—eleven of which will play out in a scant seven minutes—from Alexandre Galmard, Kelley Dong, and Isaac Goes, three filmmakers, friends, and frequent collaborators aligned with Isiah Medina’s production company, Quantity Cinema. These are lithe lashings of style—vaporous and damn-near smoked out forays into digital primitivism and video diary—that orbit the outermost edges of cinema. They will be presented chronologically and continuously.
“His is instead a cinema of the cut, of difference, of reconsidering every assumption of more than a century’s worth of filmmaking. […] I could say that 88:88 is a masterpiece but masterpieces are a term of the past; Medina has taken his first step into the future.” Phil Coldiron, Cinema Scope Magazine
“I am astounded. We mathematicians or philosophers speak so much about multiplicities, overlapping, ramifications, etc. and it is just beautiful to see all the concepts at work, with admirable visual force. The cuts, continuities, off-voices, silences, the very real superpositions of multiplicities, produce a new opening of our minds and sensibilities.” – Fernando Zalamea, mathematician and philosopher, author of “Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics”
PROGRAM
director of operations (Alexandre Galmard, 2013, 0:59)
x’s of me (Alexandre Galmard, 2013, 1:15)
jeunes ascensions (Alexandre Galmard, 2014, 1:06)
young street (Alexandre Galmard, 2015, 0:40)
red is blue (Alexandre Galmard, 2016, 0:22)
Breaking and Entering (Kelley Dong, 2017, 1:28)
Late Embryo (Kelley Dong, 2017, 0:11)
Via D7 (Alexandre Galmard, 2019, 0:56)
Shooting Star Summer Solstice (Kelley Dong, 2019, 0:18)
Pears (Kelley Dong, 2020, 0:01)
Worlds (Isaac Goes, 2021, 19:14)
Two Dogs (Kelley Dong, 2022, 0:20)
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88:88 (Isiah Medina, 2015, 01:05:00)
Employees Only Cineclub
YOUR BROTHER. REMEMBER?
Feb 11, 2026 – 7pm
FACETS, Chicago
Employees Only Cineclub Edition 11
An elaborate experiment with the concept of before-and-after photographs, Your brother. Remember? splices and dices home videos, Hollywood film footage, and live performance. As kids in rural Maine, Zachary Oberzan and his older brother Gator loved making home versions of their favorite films, most notably Jean-Claude Van Damme’s karate opus Kickboxer and the notorious cult film Faces of Death. Then twenty years passed. Estranged from his family, Zack returned to his childhood home to re-create these films, shot for shot, as precisely as possible—but now seen through a twenty-year lens of emotional and physical wear and tear. One brother became an actor, and one self-destructed. Which is which? How different are these lives? Could this story have turned out the other way around? Initially conceived as a film experiment, the project morphed into a live multimedia piece which was recorded and ultimately incorporated into the finished film.
Oberzan’s film will be preceded by Their Houses, Cam Archer’s phantasmagorical inquiry into the very notion of the home video, in which the filmmaker limns his suburban cul-de-sac for hidden truths, dreaming pathways into imagined homes, hidden rivers under the streets, the marginalized world of coyotes on the outskirts, and the knotty mythologies of all the beautiful neighbor boys. The two films, both of which are enjoying their Chicago premiere, compliment one another richly in their stark deviations as well as in their uncanny rhymes. Where Oberzan’s film unfurls in snowy Maine, Archer’s is diametrically set in sunny Santa Cruz. The grainy and under-lit VHS recordings of Oberzan’s film wash ashore of Archer’s sun-bleached and psychedelically lurid Hi8 cassette footage. In the most serendipitous turn of all, Cam Archer captures his own pair of teenage brothers who are making art to pass the time, giving them the film’s indelible closing words: “I don’t give a fuck about anyone…except my brother.”
PROGRAM
1. Their Houses (Cam Archer, 2011)
2. Your Brother. Remember? (Zachary Oberzan, 2012)
Feb 11, 2026 – 7pm
FACETS, Chicago
Employees Only Cineclub Edition 11
Open your heart and let brotherly love wash over you at a wistful double billing of lofi suburban reveries, featuring the U.S. Premiere of Cam Archer’s Their Houses (2011) and Zachary Oberzan’s Your brother. Remember? (2012), two spirited meditations on home movies, passing time, time’s passing, and the bond between two brothers.
An elaborate experiment with the concept of before-and-after photographs, Your brother. Remember? splices and dices home videos, Hollywood film footage, and live performance. As kids in rural Maine, Zachary Oberzan and his older brother Gator loved making home versions of their favorite films, most notably Jean-Claude Van Damme’s karate opus Kickboxer and the notorious cult film Faces of Death. Then twenty years passed. Estranged from his family, Zack returned to his childhood home to re-create these films, shot for shot, as precisely as possible—but now seen through a twenty-year lens of emotional and physical wear and tear. One brother became an actor, and one self-destructed. Which is which? How different are these lives? Could this story have turned out the other way around? Initially conceived as a film experiment, the project morphed into a live multimedia piece which was recorded and ultimately incorporated into the finished film.
Oberzan’s film will be preceded by Their Houses, Cam Archer’s phantasmagorical inquiry into the very notion of the home video, in which the filmmaker limns his suburban cul-de-sac for hidden truths, dreaming pathways into imagined homes, hidden rivers under the streets, the marginalized world of coyotes on the outskirts, and the knotty mythologies of all the beautiful neighbor boys. The two films, both of which are enjoying their Chicago premiere, compliment one another richly in their stark deviations as well as in their uncanny rhymes. Where Oberzan’s film unfurls in snowy Maine, Archer’s is diametrically set in sunny Santa Cruz. The grainy and under-lit VHS recordings of Oberzan’s film wash ashore of Archer’s sun-bleached and psychedelically lurid Hi8 cassette footage. In the most serendipitous turn of all, Cam Archer captures his own pair of teenage brothers who are making art to pass the time, giving them the film’s indelible closing words: “I don’t give a fuck about anyone…except my brother.”
PROGRAM
1. Their Houses (Cam Archer, 2011)
2. Your Brother. Remember? (Zachary Oberzan, 2012)
Employees Only Cineclub + UNDERCURRENTS, HI
Inaugural program
Inaugural program
LIGHT IS...
Jan 15, 2026 – 6:30pm
3rd Space, Honolulu
Employees Only Cineclub Edition 10
Employees Only is excited to take part in critic Emerson Goo’s inaugural screening for the new series UNDERCURRENTS, an intermittently convened film club screening innovative and nonfiction films in Honolulu, launching in 2026. UNDERCURRENTS is concerned with unique perspectives on living in islands, by coasts, in the tropics, from the watery, riverine, marshy parts of our world; films which build solidarity through resistance against and across national and colonially-imposed borders; experiments in form, narrative, and process which expand the possibilities of this thing called "cinema;” education for local filmmakers, including work-in-progress screening opportunities, informal film workshops, and promoting film criticism from Hawai‘i and the wider Pacific.
The all-digital program titled 'LIGHT IS' deals with light, disintegration, and the archival impulse in its most free-wheeling, remixing form. The films comment on a disintegrating existential landscape in relation to the materiality of moving image mediation. Some works take an interventionist approach — data moshing, slow-mo, and the optical reprinting of film decay. These manipulations restage genres, myths, memories, colonial imaginaries, and signification itself.
Kick off UNDERCURRENTS with this program of films linked by themes of light, disintegration, and the archival impulse.
PROGRAM
1. Light is Calling (Bill Morrison, 2004)
2. Flesh & Ghost (Sky Hopinka, 2025)
3. Second Sighted (Deborah Stratman, 2014)
4. Songs for Earth and Folk (Cauleen Smith, 2013)
5. Lossless #3 (Rebecca Baron & Douglas Goodwin, 2008)
6. Black Glass (Adam Piron, 2024)
7. Light is Waiting (Michael Robinson, 2007)
Jan 15, 2026 – 6:30pm
3rd Space, Honolulu
Employees Only Cineclub Edition 10
Employees Only is excited to take part in critic Emerson Goo’s inaugural screening for the new series UNDERCURRENTS, an intermittently convened film club screening innovative and nonfiction films in Honolulu, launching in 2026. UNDERCURRENTS is concerned with unique perspectives on living in islands, by coasts, in the tropics, from the watery, riverine, marshy parts of our world; films which build solidarity through resistance against and across national and colonially-imposed borders; experiments in form, narrative, and process which expand the possibilities of this thing called "cinema;” education for local filmmakers, including work-in-progress screening opportunities, informal film workshops, and promoting film criticism from Hawai‘i and the wider Pacific.
The all-digital program titled 'LIGHT IS' deals with light, disintegration, and the archival impulse in its most free-wheeling, remixing form. The films comment on a disintegrating existential landscape in relation to the materiality of moving image mediation. Some works take an interventionist approach — data moshing, slow-mo, and the optical reprinting of film decay. These manipulations restage genres, myths, memories, colonial imaginaries, and signification itself.
Kick off UNDERCURRENTS with this program of films linked by themes of light, disintegration, and the archival impulse.
PROGRAM
1. Light is Calling (Bill Morrison, 2004)
2. Flesh & Ghost (Sky Hopinka, 2025)
3. Second Sighted (Deborah Stratman, 2014)
4. Songs for Earth and Folk (Cauleen Smith, 2013)
5. Lossless #3 (Rebecca Baron & Douglas Goodwin, 2008)
6. Black Glass (Adam Piron, 2024)
7. Light is Waiting (Michael Robinson, 2007)
Employees Only Cineclub + aemi
Touring program curated by Daniel Fitzpatrick
Touring program curated by Daniel Fitzpatrick
THE SAID AND THE UNSAID
Nov 16, 2025 – 6pm
Chicago Filmmakers
Employees Only Cineclub Edition 9
Employees Only is excited to welcome Dublin's aemi to the Midwest for a presentation of their touring program THE SAID AND THE UNSAID on Sunday, November 16 at 6pm with Chicago Filmmakers. aemi co-founder Daniel Fitzpatrick and filmmaker Frank Sweeney will be attendance for Q&A.
This eclectic program of work shifts from an act of deliberate and playful obfuscation (Stephanie Barber’s 3 PEONIES) to a process of attempted rediscovery as Jonathan O’Grady attempts to navigate a largely inaccessible heritage site (IN SEARCH OF THE FORENAUGHTS LONGSTONE). Elsewhere Maryam Tafakory’s video essay is an uncovering of media artifacts that speak to both deliberate and discrete forms of articulation in the face of censorship (NAZARBAZI) while Frank Sweeney creates a compelling docudrama out of events surrounding the broadcasting ban (FEW CAN SEE). Collectively these works describe a variety of creative means of expression born out of the necessity to speak, however indirectly.
aemi is a Dublin-based initiative that supports and regularly exhibits moving image works by artists and experimental filmmakers. This touring program is supported by Culture Ireland and Arts Council Ireland.
PROGRAM
1. 3 Peonies (Stephanie Barber, 2017)
2. In Search of the Forenaught Longstone (Jonathan O’Grady, 2021)
3. Nazarbazi (Maryam Tafakory, 2022)
4. Few Can See (Frank Sweeney, 2023)
Nov 16, 2025 – 6pm
Chicago Filmmakers
Employees Only Cineclub Edition 9
Employees Only is excited to welcome Dublin's aemi to the Midwest for a presentation of their touring program THE SAID AND THE UNSAID on Sunday, November 16 at 6pm with Chicago Filmmakers. aemi co-founder Daniel Fitzpatrick and filmmaker Frank Sweeney will be attendance for Q&A.
This eclectic program of work shifts from an act of deliberate and playful obfuscation (Stephanie Barber’s 3 PEONIES) to a process of attempted rediscovery as Jonathan O’Grady attempts to navigate a largely inaccessible heritage site (IN SEARCH OF THE FORENAUGHTS LONGSTONE). Elsewhere Maryam Tafakory’s video essay is an uncovering of media artifacts that speak to both deliberate and discrete forms of articulation in the face of censorship (NAZARBAZI) while Frank Sweeney creates a compelling docudrama out of events surrounding the broadcasting ban (FEW CAN SEE). Collectively these works describe a variety of creative means of expression born out of the necessity to speak, however indirectly.
aemi is a Dublin-based initiative that supports and regularly exhibits moving image works by artists and experimental filmmakers. This touring program is supported by Culture Ireland and Arts Council Ireland.
PROGRAM
1. 3 Peonies (Stephanie Barber, 2017)
2. In Search of the Forenaught Longstone (Jonathan O’Grady, 2021)
3. Nazarbazi (Maryam Tafakory, 2022)
4. Few Can See (Frank Sweeney, 2023)
Employees Only Cineclub
Curated with David Whitehouse
Curated with David Whitehouse
GOTHIC KING COBRA + SWEET SAL
Sept 28, 2025 – 7pm
Elastic Arts
Employees Only Cineclub Edition 8
In memory of Joshua Fay Saunders (1991-2025), a.k.a. prolific YouTube personality and metal musician KingCobraJFS, Employees Only hosts a rare in-person screening of the internet documentary cult classic GOTHIC KING COBRA (dir. Joel Patrick a.k.a. trappped, 2014) at Elastic Arts. Saunders' cock-sure ramblings about life, death, sex, and drugs while working as a Wendy's employee in Casper, Wyoming are forever iconic. Join us for a night of digital and 16mm.
The hour-long digital doc will be preceded by the 16mm short SWEET SAL (1979, 25 min) by Tony Buba. A unique counterpoint to GOTHIC KING COBRA, SWEET SAL takes us decades back to visit upon another eccentric rambling man. In this film, a street hustler named Sal Carulli likewise embraces the small stardom of being a doc film subject, mirroring Saunders' arrogant, strange, and existential musings against a backdrop of economic devastation. Apparently, after a 1980 screening of SWEET SAL at the Pittsburgh Filmmakers co-op, Werner Herzog — smitten by the portrait — insisted to Tony Buba: “You must continue to make films, you must go steal if necessary to make films!”
"Saunders is not simply an eccentric YouTuber; he is a product of Casper, of post-industrial drift, of a culture where music, myth, and media become prosthetics for identity. That’s why later filmmakers and online commentators returned to him not as a person whose eccentric behavior could be exploited to amuse onlookers, but because he embodied the contradictions of performing oneself in public. And so, the film ends up stranger and kinder than its premise might suggest. It never tries to define Saunders, whether that be a hero, a slacker, or a future success. But it shows quietly and stubbornly that he mattered and made a mark on this world. Rest easy, King." – Shaun Huhn, Cine-File
Projectionist: Ben Creech. Film print courtesy of Chicago Filmmakers and the Picture Start Collection. Thank you to Tony Buba, Ben Creech, and Chicago Filmmakers. Thank you also to Michael Metzger and Block Cinema for providing a projector.
Sept 28, 2025 – 7pm
Elastic Arts
Employees Only Cineclub Edition 8
In memory of Joshua Fay Saunders (1991-2025), a.k.a. prolific YouTube personality and metal musician KingCobraJFS, Employees Only hosts a rare in-person screening of the internet documentary cult classic GOTHIC KING COBRA (dir. Joel Patrick a.k.a. trappped, 2014) at Elastic Arts. Saunders' cock-sure ramblings about life, death, sex, and drugs while working as a Wendy's employee in Casper, Wyoming are forever iconic. Join us for a night of digital and 16mm.
The hour-long digital doc will be preceded by the 16mm short SWEET SAL (1979, 25 min) by Tony Buba. A unique counterpoint to GOTHIC KING COBRA, SWEET SAL takes us decades back to visit upon another eccentric rambling man. In this film, a street hustler named Sal Carulli likewise embraces the small stardom of being a doc film subject, mirroring Saunders' arrogant, strange, and existential musings against a backdrop of economic devastation. Apparently, after a 1980 screening of SWEET SAL at the Pittsburgh Filmmakers co-op, Werner Herzog — smitten by the portrait — insisted to Tony Buba: “You must continue to make films, you must go steal if necessary to make films!”
"Saunders is not simply an eccentric YouTuber; he is a product of Casper, of post-industrial drift, of a culture where music, myth, and media become prosthetics for identity. That’s why later filmmakers and online commentators returned to him not as a person whose eccentric behavior could be exploited to amuse onlookers, but because he embodied the contradictions of performing oneself in public. And so, the film ends up stranger and kinder than its premise might suggest. It never tries to define Saunders, whether that be a hero, a slacker, or a future success. But it shows quietly and stubbornly that he mattered and made a mark on this world. Rest easy, King." – Shaun Huhn, Cine-File
Projectionist: Ben Creech. Film print courtesy of Chicago Filmmakers and the Picture Start Collection. Thank you to Tony Buba, Ben Creech, and Chicago Filmmakers. Thank you also to Michael Metzger and Block Cinema for providing a projector.
Employees Only Cineclub + Tone Glow
Curated with Joshua Minsoo Kim
Curated with Joshua Minsoo Kim
GRIN AND BEAR IT: CINEMA OF THE DARK CLOWN
May 16, 2025 – 7pm
Elastic Arts
Employees Only Cineclub Edition 7
Tone Glow & Employees Only present Grin and Bear It: Cinema of the Dark Clown, a multimedia event centered on the figure of the dark clown in experimental moving image. The festivities are broken into three programs: 1) an analog film showcase of works by Jack Smith and Luther Price, 2) videos highlighting the dark comedy of Hester Scheurwater, Ximena Cuevas, Anne McGuire, and Paul & Marlene Kos, and 3) lyrical 16mm films from Jean Sousa, Donna Cameron, and Fred Worden. The evening will also include two live clowning and puppetry performances from local artist Justin D’Acci.
PROGRAM 1 (16mm & Super 8mm)
1. Mr. Wonderful (Luther Price, 1988)
2. Song For Rent (Jack Smith, 1969)
3. Hot Air Specialists (Jack Smith, 1980)
4. Clown (Luther Price, 1990-2002)
CLOWN PERFORMANCE
PROGRAM 2 (Digital)
1. Ensayo de un Crimen (Ximena Cuevas, 2005)
2. Poster Girl (Hester Scheurwater, 2003)
3. I Am Crazy and You’re Not Wrong (Anne McGuire, 1997)
4. Sirens (Paul Kos & Marlene Kos, 1977)
PUPPET PERFORMANCE
PROGRAM 3 (16mm)
1. The Circus (Jean Sousa, 1977)
2. The Clown (Donna Cameron, 1998)
3. Throbs (Fred Worden, 1972)
May 16, 2025 – 7pm
Elastic Arts
Employees Only Cineclub Edition 7
Tone Glow & Employees Only present Grin and Bear It: Cinema of the Dark Clown, a multimedia event centered on the figure of the dark clown in experimental moving image. The festivities are broken into three programs: 1) an analog film showcase of works by Jack Smith and Luther Price, 2) videos highlighting the dark comedy of Hester Scheurwater, Ximena Cuevas, Anne McGuire, and Paul & Marlene Kos, and 3) lyrical 16mm films from Jean Sousa, Donna Cameron, and Fred Worden. The evening will also include two live clowning and puppetry performances from local artist Justin D’Acci.
PROGRAM 1 (16mm & Super 8mm)
1. Mr. Wonderful (Luther Price, 1988)
2. Song For Rent (Jack Smith, 1969)
3. Hot Air Specialists (Jack Smith, 1980)
4. Clown (Luther Price, 1990-2002)
CLOWN PERFORMANCE
PROGRAM 2 (Digital)
1. Ensayo de un Crimen (Ximena Cuevas, 2005)
2. Poster Girl (Hester Scheurwater, 2003)
3. I Am Crazy and You’re Not Wrong (Anne McGuire, 1997)
4. Sirens (Paul Kos & Marlene Kos, 1977)
PUPPET PERFORMANCE
PROGRAM 3 (16mm)
1. The Circus (Jean Sousa, 1977)
2. The Clown (Donna Cameron, 1998)
3. Throbs (Fred Worden, 1972)
“Throughout the event, the clown is found in conceptual, queer, and feminine forms, in criminality and pranksterism, in metaphorical explorations of the circus’ beauties and sorrows. ‘Grin and Bear It’ will remind us that the dark clown is up for grabs as a multivalent cipher for contemporary alienation, one which sublimates our collective desires for revolution. He is a mythically charged trickster forced to wear a smile while wiping pie off his face. Despite his enduring status as the contemporary avatar of ironic detachment—popularized by the Joker archetype—he is difficult to pin down as a cultural singularity. He’s at once a foil to notions of order and justice, an anarchist driven to the outer reaches of sanity by undying capitalist structures, and a giddy nihilist enlightening us to the many hypocrisies of our cruel world. Ultimately, we keep a distance while admitting to his charms.” — David Whitehouse & Elise Schierbeek
Justin D’Acci (b. 1997) is a Chicago-based clown, artist, and puppeteer who experiments with found objects and techniques of automatism. Recent exhibitions include Survey (2025) at Unda.m. 93; Tenebrae (2024) at Weatherproof; Pressure Dome (2023) at SULK; along with a slew of happenings throughout Chicago’s parks. His puppetry has been presented most often for Rough House’s cabaret—Nasty, Brutish & Short—at Link’s Hall, and most recently at the New Orleans Giant Puppet Festival. He holds irregular clown classes for the delirious among ye.
Throughout the event, the clown is found in conceptual, queer, and feminine forms, in criminality and pranksterism, in metaphorical explorations of the circus’ beauties and sorrows. Projectionists: Josh Mabe and Ben Creech. Film prints courtesy of Canyon Cinema and the Filmmakers Coop. Videos courtesy of Video Data Bank.
Justin D’Acci (b. 1997) is a Chicago-based clown, artist, and puppeteer who experiments with found objects and techniques of automatism. Recent exhibitions include Survey (2025) at Unda.m. 93; Tenebrae (2024) at Weatherproof; Pressure Dome (2023) at SULK; along with a slew of happenings throughout Chicago’s parks. His puppetry has been presented most often for Rough House’s cabaret—Nasty, Brutish & Short—at Link’s Hall, and most recently at the New Orleans Giant Puppet Festival. He holds irregular clown classes for the delirious among ye.
Throughout the event, the clown is found in conceptual, queer, and feminine forms, in criminality and pranksterism, in metaphorical explorations of the circus’ beauties and sorrows. Projectionists: Josh Mabe and Ben Creech. Film prints courtesy of Canyon Cinema and the Filmmakers Coop. Videos courtesy of Video Data Bank.
Employees Only Cineclub + Video Data Bank
Curated with Ben Russell
AGAINST TIME — Time as actual, time as embodied, time in-itself, time as myth, time as perception. Ben Russell in conversatin with Elise Schierbeek and David Whitehouse.
April 8, 2025 – 7pm
FACETS Film Forum
Employees Only Cineclub Edition 6
Workers Leaving the Factory (Dubai) – (16mm to digital, 2008, 6:37)
Black and White Trypps Number Three – (35mm to digital, 5.1, 2007, 11:30)
River Rites – (S16mm to digital, 2011, 11:00)
Atlantis – (S16mm to digital, 2014, 23:33)
Against Time – (S16mm to digital, 5.1, 2022, 23:00)
April 8, 2025 – 7pm
FACETS Film Forum
Employees Only Cineclub Edition 6
Workers Leaving the Factory (Dubai) – (16mm to digital, 2008, 6:37)
Black and White Trypps Number Three – (35mm to digital, 5.1, 2007, 11:30)
River Rites – (S16mm to digital, 2011, 11:00)
Atlantis – (S16mm to digital, 2014, 23:33)
Against Time – (S16mm to digital, 5.1, 2022, 23:00)
Onion City Experimental Film Festival (Chicago Filmmakers)
Curated with Nicky Ni
The 35th edition of Onion City Experimental Film Festival, offering four days of competition programs and special events, including expanded cinema and feature length showcases. Onion City is one of the premiere international festivals exclusively devoted to experimental film and video. Onion City is presented by Chicago Filmmakers, celebrating over 50 years championing underground, experimental, and radical film. Over 40 selected films were presented in six thematic competition screenings, along with six special events premiering work by Chicago filmmakers, screening rare and restored prints, and showcasing moving images in expanded formats. Learn more about the programs at https://www.onioncityfilmfest.org/.
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April 3-6, 2025
Chicago Filmmakers
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April 3-6, 2025
Chicago Filmmakers
Employees Only Cineclub
Curated with Esteban Alarcón + Andrea Florens
SPECIES BEING, featuring experimental works by Mary Helena Clark + Mike Gibisser, Jesse Malmed + ONO, and Dana Dawud. The program focuses on the ways in which capitalism inscribes worlds and futures for living beings through codes, patents, myths, and other syntaxes. December 7 at 7pm, Sweet Void Cinema in Humboldt Park, followed by Q&A with Mike Gibisser and Jesse Malmed.
December 7, 2024 – 7pm
Sweet Void Cinema
Employees Only Cineclub Edition 5
Noah’s Ark – Dana Dawud (2024, 8 min)
WHIRRED, WHIRLED – Jesse Malmed + ONO (2015, 7 min)
A Common Sequence – Mary Helena Clark + Mike Gibisser (2023, 78 min)
TRT 93 min
December 7, 2024 – 7pm
Sweet Void Cinema
Employees Only Cineclub Edition 5
Noah’s Ark – Dana Dawud (2024, 8 min)
WHIRRED, WHIRLED – Jesse Malmed + ONO (2015, 7 min)
A Common Sequence – Mary Helena Clark + Mike Gibisser (2023, 78 min)
TRT 93 min
Peripheries Experimental Film & Video Festival 2024
Guest Curator
Cloudwards: Waiting is a Dreaming ascends through various spaces of anticipation—pauses between strikes of lightning, a bus full of passengers nodding off, city alcoves in a downpour, reality TV elimination rounds, or the instructional stage of an indoor skydiving facility. Each work dreams in such spaces, steadfastly aspiring toward flight, progress, inflation, chance encounter, the taste of winning, dry ground, or a truer sleep. Documentarian sensibilities intermingle with found footage free-form experimentation and infrared interludes. By way of bats and pilots, rockets and space dogs, earthquakes and birds, the works of this program always tilt cloudwards. (1976-2024, 46 mins, Digital Projection.)
September 29, 2024 – 7pm
Sweet Void Cinema
Peripheries Experimental Film & Video Festival 2024
Laika – Deborah Stratman (2021, 4:33 min)
Helianthus Corner Blues – Jem Cohen (2013, 2:48 min)
Lightning – Paul & Marlene Kos (1976, 1:23 min)
ADARNA – Don Josephus Raphael Eblahan (2017, 1:00 min)
ROCKET – Katharina Bayer (2024, 5:00 min)
Somewhere only we know – Jesse McLean (2009, 5:15 min)
All Days Make Their End – Julian Flavin (2023, 13:30 min)
Life Without Dreams – Jessica Bardsley (2022, 13:30 min)
Memory Drum brings together memory, water, and family on 16mm film with a percussive throughline. The works of this program are elemental yet figurative, exploring kaleidoscopic relationships between parent and child, distortion and fidelity, rhythm and stillness. Leighton Pierce’s Glass (1998) initiates the program with an impressionistic tableau of children in the backyard through a glass menagerie of lens manipulation. Alee Peoples’ Hey Sweet Pea (2023) stages fanciful recitations that sweep us into a strange, hollowed-out nostalgia of sci-fi scripts and mama’s old voicemails in the LA suburbs. Carl Elsaesser’s How to Run a Trotline (2024) holds the drumline as the program’s luminous cornerstone, a spirited reflection on paternal tethers, both filmic and genealogical, that fishes for something alive and kicking in each of its brimming images. O Banho (The Bath) (2022) is Maria Inês Gonçalves’ turn to the phenomenology of water as filtered through childhood memories of bathing. As if beckoning us through amniotic fluid, toy boats and stuffed animals dunk and bob like repressed things, water goes where it shouldn’t go, and in the tumult we catch sight of Winnie the Pooh’s Heffalumps galloping through the ether, having long forgotten how they haunted us so. (1998-2024, 55 mins, 16mm Film and Digital Projection.)
September 29, 2024 – 5:30pm
Sweet Void Cinema, Projected by Ben Creech
Peripheries Experimental Film & Video Festival 2024
Glass – Leighton Pierce (1998, US, 16mm film, 7:00 min)
Hey Sweet Pea – Alee Peoples (2023, US, 16mm film, 11:11 min)
How to Run a Trotline – Carl Elsaesser (2024, US, 16mm film to digital, 18:10 min)
O Banho (The Bath) – Maria Inês Gonçalves (2022, Portugal/Spain, 16mm and 8mm to digital, 8:00 min)
Comfort Film
Guest Curator
Guest Curator
Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005) at Comfort Station alongside shorts by video artist Shana Moulton. Log into new age everyday animism, good old human connection and/or lack thereof.
April 10, 2024 – 8pm
Comfort Station
Whispering Pines 5 – Shana Moulton (2005)
MindPlace ThoughtStream – Shana Moulton (2014)
Me and You and Everyone We Know – Miranda July (2005)
April 10, 2024 – 8pm
Comfort Station
Whispering Pines 5 – Shana Moulton (2005)
MindPlace ThoughtStream – Shana Moulton (2014)
Me and You and Everyone We Know – Miranda July (2005)