Chicago Critics Film Festival

About the Event

Schedule:

4:30pm - Shorts Program 2 - 89 Minutes
Baigal Nuur - Lake Baikal - The formation of Lake Baikal in Siberia is reimagined with hand-painted animation and mixed materials, featuring the voice of an Indigenous woman who can still recall some words in her endangered language in Buryat (a Mongolian dialect). Directed by Alisi Telengut.

Bug Diner - A dissatisfied marriage, a secret crush, and work-place fantasies come undone in a Diner run by a Mole Chef with a hot  a s s. Winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s Short Film Jury Award: Animation. Directed by Phoebe Jane Hart.

The Big Wait  -  In a remote desert town in Australia, population two, a couple manages an emergency airport and keeps vacant cottages in pristine condition, waiting for visitors who never seem to arrive. Directed by Yannick Jamey.

Flail - An addled farce for the attention economy, Flail follows a distracted personal assistant as she frantically prepares for her boss’s birthday party. With her sullen brother David in tow, Allie careens through a blur of gridlocked parking garages and fast-casual salad chains, all part of her desperate quest to achieve a single thing that she initially set out to do. Directed by Ben Gauthier.

I Would’ve Been Happy - 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 my family's domestic spaces in the hope to uncover logic to a broken home. Directed by Jordan Wong.

Shé (Snake) - Fei, a 16 year old British-Chinese girl, is the top violinist in an elite  London youth orchestra. When another Chinese violinist arrives to challenge her place in the orchestra, Fei’s anxieties and internalized racism grow to take monstrous physical form. They whisper to her, urging her to be the best, no matter the cost. Directed by Renee Zhan.

Au 8eme Jour (On the 8th Day)  - It took 7 days to create the world, it only took one to disrupt its  balance. Directed by Agathe Sénéchal, Alicia Massez, Elise Debruyne,  Flavie Carin, Théo Duhautois.

Welcome To the Enclave  - Two Texas sisters fled to the metaverse at the onset of the pandemic,  creating The Enclave, a cyber-haven for ‘like-minded women’. Years  later, the suburb is on the verge of bankruptcy, and owner Moni Calvioni  is crowdfunding to save her digital utopia. With no awareness of online  culture, she and her sister Blair turn to Twitch and Reddit to pitch  their idealized vision. Directed by Sarah Lasley.

7:00pm - Dandelion With Guests - 113 Minutes
Directed by Nicole Riegel
Dandelion, a struggling Cincinnati singer-songwriter in a downward spiral, takes a last-ditch-effort gig at a motorcycle rally in South Dakota where she meets Casey, a guitarist who walked away from his dream long ago. As Dandelion joins Casey’s nomadic group of struggling musicians, the kindred spirits make music together and strike up a whirlwind romance. The experience moves Dandelion from a narrow view of success to a deeper appreciation of her artistic journey, and the discovery of a voice that is authentically her own.

9:45pm - Flipside - 92 minutes
Directed by Christopher Wilcha
When filmmaker Chris Wilcha revisits the record store he worked at as a teenager in New Jersey, he finds the once-thriving bastion of music and weirdness from his youth slowly falling apart and out of touch with the times. FLIPSIDE documents his tragicomic attempt to revive the store while revisiting other documentary projects he has abandoned over the years. In the process, Wilcha captures This American Life icon Ira Glass in the midst of a creative rebirth, discovers the origin story of David Bowie’s ode to a local New Jersey cable television hero, and uncovers the unlikely connection between jazz photographer Herman Leonard and TV writer David Milch. This disparate collection of stories coheres into something strange and expansive—a moving meditation on music, work, and the sacrifices and satisfaction of trying to live a creative life.

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