Chicago Filmmakers, the presenting organization of the Onion City Experimental Film Festival, is pleased to announce a dynamic lineup of eight competition screenings and five special event programs for its 36th edition. Recognized by Moviemaker Magazine as one of the top five "coolest" experimental and underground film festivals in the world, Onion City recognizes excellence in experimental film and expanded cinema. Onion City runs from April 9 – 12, 2026, at four venues. Additional information and tickets are available at www.onioncityfilmfest.org.

OPENING NIGHT

Opening Night (Thursday, April 9) is a double event, beginning with a viewing and reception at 150 Media Stream (150 N. Riverside Plaza) from 5:30-7:30pm. Featured on 150 Media Stream's unique digital wall are two works selected by Onion City's opening night guest curator — acclaimed digital and new media artist Peter Burr, renowned for his large-scale installations in locations such as Times Square. This bold and immersive program includes Burr's Continuous Monument, commissioned by 150 Media Stream, alternating with French animation artist Boris Labbé's newly adapted work Ito Meikyū. Originally a VR work, Ito Meikyū, which premiered at the 2024 Venice International Film Festival, develops around references from Japanese art history and literature (the Fukinuki Yatai, The Tale of Genji, The Pillow Book) and unfolds as a large sensory fresco. A heterogeneous set of drawn, animated, and sound scenes are taken from digital material; they recreate a kind of subjective world (inner and outer) in the form of a labyrinth composed of fractal architectures, inhabited by plants, objects, animals, men, women, motifs, and calligraphy. 150 Media Stream will also present Ito Meikyū in its original VR format, offering visitors the rare opportunity to experience this interactive 20-minute artwork through a VR headset.

Onion City's Opening Night continues at 8pm at the Gene Siskel Film Center (164 N. State St.), with the shorts program USEFUL FANTASY, curated by Burr. The screening features experimental and animated films from 1979 – 2026, including 35mm prints of Suzan Pitt's celebrated animation Asparagus (1979) — showing in a restored archival print – and Austrian filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky's stunning widescreen experimental collage/horror film Outer Space (1999), along with digital presentations of works by Burr, Labbé, Vince Collins, and Shana Moulton. Artist/curator Peter Burr is scheduled to attend both events. 

COMPETITION PROGRAMS

Eight programs of films in competition, selected from nearly 700 international submissions, will be screened at Chicago Filmmakers' Firehouse Cinema (1326 W. Hollywood Ave.) from Friday, April 10 to Sunday, April 12. 

ECSTATIC DEVOTIONS (Friday, April 10, 6:00pm) 

ECSTATIC DEVOTIONS are rites, relics, and remains. The program comprises acts that corrupt the surface, acts of transmutation and metamorphosis, and gestures burned into the body's muscle memory — movements of a spiritual spiral.

INVISIBLE CITIES (Saturday, April 11, 12:00pm)

Traipse through INVISIBLE CITIES, the domain of speculative societies evoked when the unexpected happens. Works in this program contend with isolation, utopianism, and apocalypse.

AFTERIMAGE (Saturday, April 11, 2:00pm)

This program is a collage of diaries and fragments. The films drift and return like an afterthought, like reflections or memories that lingered. Fleeting, hazy, at times hypnotic, AFTERIMAGE moves like a flâneur, walking across space and time.

VENTURED GAINS (Saturday, April 11, 4:00pm)

Tally up your VENTURED GAINS to explore risk and reward with an abiding humor. Liability, surveillance, breaking, entering, investment, theft, and gambling. The works of this program take on "vulgar extravaganzas," "fears and veneers," and "social acerbities."

LATE NIGHT WITH TYCOON (Saturday, April 11, 8:00pm)

Co-presented by Tone Glow

In her feature directorial debut, Tycoon (2025), Charlotte Zhang remixes low-budget filmmaking techniques to reimagine a dystopian Los Angeles in the near future, seen through the eyes of two wandering youths. The program opens with Dirty Eye (2025) by Keng U Lao, a journey through the illusionistic city of Macau — the Las Vegas of the East — blurred by sleights of hand. Charlotte Zhang is scheduled to attend for a Q&A with Chicago film programmer Joshua Minsoo Kim of Tone Glow. 

STRUCTURAL COLLAPSE (Sunday, April 12, 12:00pm)

Break down with STRUCTURAL COLLAPSE, a lineup of works that burst apart, topple, freak out, undo, disintegrate, and at times sow chaos. Pixels explode, the internet hemorrhages, institutions shut down, and language fails to cohere. We walk through the funhouse, mess up our ABCs, learn to fall, and punch the clock harder than we ever have before.

BLUE, BLUE (Sunday, April 12, 2:00pm)

The color blue. The color Maggie Nelson fell in love with for us to have the Bluets. In response, this program presents a set of moving bluets. Some films are literally blue, drenched in cyan; others explore grief, desire, the loss of innocence, the ache of sehnsucht. Blue is what we make of ourselves, and blue is what we remember.

MUTABLE RECORDS (Sunday, April 12, 4:00pm)

Parse the past as MUTABLE RECORDS, a program of works that deconstruct oppressive histories through montage, testimony, surrealism, and reverie. Memories and archival footage are arranged with insight, dignity, and curiosity.

ADDITIONAL SPECIAL EVENTS AND CLOSING NIGHT

[WE DON'T KNOW YET] WHAT A CINEMA CAN DO (Friday, April 10, 8:00pm; doors open at 7:30pm)

Public Works Gallery (2141 W. North Ave)

Co-presented with the Center for Concrete and Abstract Machines (CCAM)

Onion City and CCAM co-present the third annual edition of [WE DON'T KNOW YET] WHAT A CINEMA CAN DO, a night of new media live performance with the theme of Disintegrating Archives. This event explores the resonances of "expanded cinema" today, putting cinematic art to the tasks of resistance, rupture, and reconfiguration of mediatic experience. We ask: how can experimental modes of animating sound and moving images reconfigure the possibility of our relating to one another anew? Re: mix; vision; mediate; compile; concile; wire; work; enact. This year WDKY features new works or reworkings by three artists developing distinct technical, aesthetic, and cultural niches. AJ McClenon's transmedia sound and video work moves through topics of blackness, beauty, personal narrative, and the broad spectrum of femininity. The arts collective Alterotics' moving-image art, archival research, and event hosting activates public life for trans/queer people. James Connolly's real-time sound and media performance activates expressive potentials of technical systems sequestered behind consumer interfaces. These three artists are also joined by special guest Aria Pedraza, who will introduce the Midwest Rave Culture Archive.

BEYOND RESOLUTION: FILMS BY SABINE GRUFFAT (Saturday, April 11, 6:00pm)

Chicago Filmmakers' Firehouse Cinema (1326 W. Hollywood Ave.)

Sponsored by the Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago

This special screening and conversation with artist Sabine Gruffat features a selection of her extensive filmography, with works made from 2007 to 2025. The program favors ambiguity and resists resolution. The nearer the gaze, the more obscure the view. Illegibility here is not an escape from politics, but a way of inhabiting it differently: as a site of tension, friction, and possibility. These films draw from a range of genres and layered techniques. Images are processed to draw attention to the hidden logics in software, hardware, and materiality. In repurposing media, the works call attention to the histories from which meaning's fragile frameworks emerge. Gruffat is a French American artist born in Bangkok, Thailand. She co-founded and co-programs the Cosmic Rays Film Festival in Chapel Hill, NC, with filmmaker Bill Brown. Currently she lives in Marseille, France. Sabine Gruffat is scheduled to attend. 

OFF CENTER: GANGSTERISM (ONION CITY CLOSING NIGHT) (Sunday, April 12, 7:00pm)

Gene Siskel Film Center (164 N. State Street)

Co-presented by OFF CENTER, Gene Siskel Film Center

The 36th edition of the Onion City Experimental Film Festival concludes with the Chicago premiere of Canadian artist Isiah Medina's latest experimental feature. Gangsterism (2025, Canada, 84 min) updates the gangster film as the tale of director-gangster Clem, who ponders the politics of film circulation, financing, and representation while his artist cronies track down an old comrade rumored to be a leaker. Medina is a Canadian experimental filmmaker who directs and produces films with his company Quantity Cinema. His films have played at the Locarno Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Berlin Critics' Week, Jeonju International Film Festival, and the Viennale. Isiah Medina and composer Kieran Daly are scheduled to attend for a post-screening conversation.

Onion City is a production of Chicago Filmmakers, a 50+ year-old not-for-profit media arts organization providing film exhibition, educational programs, and resources for filmmakers and film lovers alike.

Onion City 2026 co-presenters and partners include: 150 Media Stream; Gene Siskel Film Center; Center for Concrete and Abstract Machines; Public Works; Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Off Center; Tone Glow; Employees Only; and The Neu Lithium