PROGRAM

Household elegies for the spaces that we can visit but never truly return to. In WHERE PERFECT GRACE REMAINED, the sight of a garden, an old house, or even a pickle ball court unlocks hidden memories. The filmmakers use celluloid film as a means to preserve stories of lost loved ones, challenge colonial histories, and savor the sights and sounds of places that were once called home.

Greetings from Bonita | Caitlin Ryan | United States, 2022, 5 mins

Celebrity, family, death, and bugs. This film is somewhere between a postcard and stream of consciousness.

Kicking the Clouds | Sky Hopinka | United States, 2021, 15 mins

This film is a reflection on descendants and ancestors, guided by a 50 year old audio recording of my grandmother learning the Pechanga language from her mother. After being given this tape by my mother, I interviewed her and asked about it, and recorded her ruminations on their lives and her own. The footage is of our chosen home in Whatcom County, Washington, where my family still lives, far from our homelands in Southern California, yet a home nonetheless.

Summer Light for Tula | Silvia Turchin | United States, 2021, 9 mins

SUMMER LIGHT FOR TULA is a garden symphony of sorts, a tribute to the light and beauty, and an effort to reconcile with death. Moving from the concrete toward the abstract, the film lives in a liminal place between sleep and wakefulness, oneness and consciousness.

Home When You Return | Carl Elsaesser | United States, 2021, 30 mins

Superimposing the stories of two women— the filmmaker’s late grandmother and the amateur filmmaker Joan Thurber Baldwin— HOME WHEN YOU RETURN explores the psychogeographies of mourning through a variety of modes, from documentary to melodrama. Emptied and put up for sale following its matriarch’s passing, the family home becomes the site of a winding tour through polymorphic representations of the past in media and memory.

Golden Jubilee | Suneil Sanzgiri | India/United States, 2021, 19 mins

The title GOLDEN JUBILEE refers to both a forgiveness of debt and the 50th anniversary of liberation. This final chapter of the trilogy moves with a sense of palpable urgency. It underlines both the losses in our personal quests for repair in the shadow of imperial legacies and compels us to look further than the ancestral in our shared pursuit of collective liberation.

Chicago Filmmakers Firehouse Cinema

In-person screenings are held at Chicago Filmmakers firehouse cinema located at 1326 W Hollywood Ave in the Edgewater neighborhood. Please be sure to arrive 15 minutes prior to showtime and be ready to present your order confirmation number for admission. Proof of full vaccination or a negative Covid-19 PCR test result is required to attend all screenings and events.