This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.
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REVIEW: Diego Marcon, “Krapfen” at the Renaissance Society
Diego Marcon’s Krapfen closed at the Renaissance Society two weeks ago, leaving me haunted by its hallows. The Italian artist, in his US debut curated by Myriam Ben Salah, presented this film through the double doors of Cobb Hall, confronting viewers with the backside of a gridded and clamped LED screen before they could face the unified front of it. Every inch of wall in the 3200 square foot gallery was rendered in an egg yolk veneer of yellow paint, complimented with matching wall-to-wall carpet and electric cables. The Ren’s gothic arched windows, opaqued with a white film, foreclosed the outside world of the University of Chicago’s campus, flattening the exterior light source for the unfolding of strange and familiar events.
Krapfen’s 4 minute and 44 second loop begins with the switch of a light, turned on by a dark haired figure lying prone on a bed covered by one pink and one baby-blue blanket. With face cocked toward the crack of a closet door, The Kid, a rosy-cheeked person with green almond eyes of non-specified gender, is aroused in a bedroom trimmed with egg yoke yellow wainscoting and matching wall to wall carpet. The Kid sits up and fixes their gaze outward, towards the viewer, conflating the gallery space with their own room. For five seconds, subject and viewer stare into each others’ interiors. This titillating pause is interrupted by a window blown ajar, white curtain flowing open to reveal a cornflower blue sky.
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: "Zoonomia” (Dec. 5-12)
Zoonomia represents an imaginative investigation into how things might have evolved if events had followed a slightly different trajectory, allowing for hybrids of existing organisms, the return of extinct species and unpredictable motivations, interactions and outcomes.
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: "Performance No. 19190301” (Nov. 28-Dec. 4)
Teenage boy Seong-hyun sets out on a journey with his grandmother Byeong-hee, who suggests leaving without revealing a destination. However, their car breaks down, preventing them from starting their trip. At that moment, the TV installed in the car broadcasts a mysterious performance titled "Performance No. 19190301." As the show begins, Seong-hyun and Byeong-hee embark on a journey through the history of Korea's past.
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: "The Martial Forest” (Nov. 21-27)
In a dystopian future, exiled Kung Fu master Big Sister 13 leads a gang of trans and queer fighters who reclaim a forgotten zone and transform it into the Martial Forest—a secret training ground where care is as powerful as combat. Together, they fight to survive rising violence and build a future rooted in chosen family and trans resistance.
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: "Baby Fever” (Nov. 14-20)
A young wife loses her pregnancy—then the rest of her body—after moving to a suburb run by a strangely ritualistic mothers’ group.
REVIEW: The Bodies and the Bees, Yorgos Lanthimo’s “Bugonia”
“I went down all the pipelines. Alt-light, alt-right, democratic socialist, Marxism… I was hungry and I bought the whole store,” says Teddy (Jesse Plemmons). He is the protagonist of Yorgos Lanthimos’ newest feature film, Bugonia. Sitting at the dinner table in his family home, he delivers this speech to his cousin and only friend Don (Aidan Delbis) and Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), Teddy’s employer/captive. He’s explaining his belief system, and how Michelle fits in, as she’s chained to the floor.
Lanthimos’ movie, based on the 2003 Korean film Save the Green Planet by Jang Joon-hwan, centers on two cousins convinced of an alien conspiracy that inspires them to kidnap Michelle, CEO of the powerful pharmaceutical company Auxolith. As the authorities and their own deadline draw near, the two scramble to control their plot without letting Michelle, who they believe is an alien in human form, gain the upper hand.
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: "Maman” (Nov. 7-13)
Marie-Hélène, my mother, is retiring and takes with her her memories, her anxieties and the mental burden of having raised three children while working full time. As she works her last shift as a home nurse, her thoughts jostle and harmonize in a whirlwind similar to a panic attack.
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: "SUTURA” (Oct. 31-Nov. 6)
Ale, a frustrated artist, seeks solace in Carlos, but their codependent relationship hides a secret: self-harm. As they delve into their passions, they discover those scars hold a unique bond only they understand.
REVIEW: Julia Hechtman, “Acts of Disappearance: Environmental”
There is an expanse of cold, black-blue water. In the distance, snow covered mountains reaching into a white sky. The scene is imposing, almost hostile, and utterly inhuman; its framing in the camera lens feels both guerrilla and impossibly staged. If these stretches of snow, ice, and stone can be considered life, they live at a time scale far greater than our own and eclipse us in every respect. As if to underscore, or undermine, this point, an ice float drifts into frame. A woman in a red puffer jacket stands on it, arms stretched wide. She looks from the distance to the camera and steadily drifts onwards, out of frame. Appearing, disappearing, gone.
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: "These Yellow Stars of Ours” (Oct. 3-Oct. 9)
“These Yellow Stars of Ours” is an experimental documentary film chronicling two individuals fleeing war-torn Vietnam, falling in love, and the subsequent inheritance of diaspora bestowed upon their two sons.
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: "huracán” (Oct. 17-Oct. 23)
An inner hurricane summons errant images and drifting fragments of time, dragging them toward a threshold that resists form. A voice, part invocation, part echo, emerges from within the storm. Between the lived and the imagined, memory disintegrates and reconfigures, not to be understood, but to be felt. This is a ritual of passage: where chaos becomes a kind of language, where what is lost is not retrieved, but transformed, and what dies, opens.
COMMENTARY On Jennifer Reeder’s “Perpetrator” (on the Occasion of its Arrow Video Release), Ducournau & Resonances of the New French Extremity
Masterfully challenging Western notions of queer liberation, the debut graphic novel of South Korean comic artist Yudori seems anything but introductory. At the center of the period piece lies a Dutch housewife, Amélie, shackled by a loveless marriage and 16th-century patriarchal norms. Fascinated by physics and the mechanics of flight, she forms an unlikely partnership with her husband’s enslaved mistress, Sahara, as they attempt to design a hot air balloon capable of carrying them both to freedom.
Raging Clouds begins with a classic formula: smart female protagonist in a time when women aren’t supposed to be smart. Yudori delivers the expected amount of feminist one-liners for such a story, satisfying despite the fact that rich white women lamenting married life stopped being revolutionary about ten years ago. “You leave me alone with my own vice, as I leave you to do whatever you like with your slave,” Amélie responds to her husband’s upteenth attempt to quell her scientific experimentation (or as he calls it, sorcery). “See you in hell, my husband.” Equally expected yet satisfying is the result of his later appropriation of her and Sahara’s balloon.
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: "The Vortex We Made When We Fell, or so the story goes” (Oct. 10-Oct. 16)
As a recursive, never completed practice of genre subversion, the work belongs somewhere in the middle, in the void, in the failed attempt to pin down some objective reality. The video was collaborative, improvised and completed in one take. I provided performers with costumes, a location and a prompt. A couple lives in a haunted house and is visited by a priest who attempts to exorcise the home. We subjected cliches to reality and saw what happens when real people do their best to negotiate an unfamiliar circumstance. The house played an important role as it represented an iconic cliche and a part of the colonial imaginary. Researching the house I learned that, although built in the 18th century, it had been renovated to look more modern, then stripped again, in later years, to look original. However its lost original furnishings were replaced with fake and decontextualized period objects. The house itself became the exercise in memory I attempted to tell through the story. An eternal recurrence, a recycling of memory with no end or definite beginning and no concrete reality.
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: "Social Media Delivers People” (Oct. 3-9)
Social Media Delivers People is a video art piece that critically examines the role of social media in the commodification of users. Drawing inspiration from Richard Serra and Carlotta Schoolman’s 1973 work Television Delivers People, this piece reimagines the critique for the digital age, exposing how social media platforms transform users into products for advertisers. Through a blend of AI spoken text, calm visuals, and bland corporate motivational instrumental music, the video reveals the unseen mechanics of surveillance capitalism—where engagement is monetized, data is harvested, and attention is the ultimate currency. Social Media Delivers People confronts viewers with their own complicity in a system that trades connection for profit. The work serves as both a warning and an invitation to reclaim digital agency, urging audiences to rethink their participation in the social media economy.
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: "Monster Me” (Sept. 26-Oct. 2)
An ancient monster emerges from the “Old Faithful” geyser at Yellowstone, attacking an artist doing a residency and wreaking havoc in Jackson Hole.
Shot from miniature hand-made paper and cardboard models and sets combined with video sequences, the monster, Satyrius Marinus, from a seventeenth century engraving, comes back to life and bursts from an “Old Faithful” calendar image, surprising a tour bus full of Asian tourists among others. An innocent artist is accosted while taking a shower by this terrifying beast with a wicked sense of humor, as Donald Trump`s victory speech plays on her laptop.
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: "The Breathers ” (May 30-June 5)
Using Stacy Hardy and Daniel Borzutzky’s collaborative long-form poem The Breathers as a point of departure, the cinepoem of the same name will discuss breath as a form of resistance, asphyxiation in Africa and the Americas, and collaborating with musicians as a form of writing.
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: "Vollúpya” (May 23-29)
In a post-apocalyptic future, an intergalactic explorer lands at an abandoned museum on a quest to find traces of his long-lost ancestors, and ends up being teleported to the dance floor of a Brazilian queer nightclub in the 1990s.
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: "Kinky and Loving It” (May 16-22)
KINKY AND LOVING IT delves into the world of Black Rope play and BDSM impact play, examining the profound impact of these practices within the kink community and addressing the role of race within this context.
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: "Ghorba (غربة)” (May 9-15)
A visual poem examining notions of exile, intergenerational migration, and memory between Cairo, New York and Kuwait.

