Chicago Underground Film Festival Launches The Underground with Award-Winning Program at FACETS

The Chicago Underground Film Festival (CUFF) inaugurates The Underground, its new membership program featuring quarterly archival screenings from more than three decades of radical film programming, with a four-film showcase drawn from the 2025 festival. The in-person screening takes place at FACETS in Chicago on Friday, March 6 at 7pm; a virtual version will be available exclusively to members of The Underground.

This first program brings together four award-winning films spanning speculative fiction, archival excavation, political documentary, and hybrid nonfiction. Collectively, these works examine labor, memory, disappearance, and resistance, using cinema as a tool for cultural inquiry and historical recovery.

The evening opens with three short films that approach social systems from radically different angles. Fresh Values, directed by Drew Durepos and Isaac Brooks, is a speculative 16mm satire in which a struggling urban food co-op adopts augmented-reality technology, only to watch innovation metastasize into surveillance and absurdity. The film received the Best Narrative Short Award at CUFF32.

American Alternative: Kurt Heyl, directed by Josh B. Mabe with Ben Creech, resurrects the overlooked legacy of Chicago underground filmmaker Kurt Heyl through raw archival material and firsthand testimony; it was honored with the Best Use of Archival Footage Award at CUFF32.

Survival Without Rent, directed by Elana Meyers and Katie Heiserman, chronicles 1980s New York squatters who transformed abandoned buildings into a radical community of artists and activists. The film received the Best Short Documentary Award at CUFF32.

A post-shorts Q&A with Isaac Brooks, Josh B. Mabe, and Ben Creech will explore process, collaboration, and the role of alternative exhibition in preserving marginalized stories.

The program concludes with Your Touch Makes Others Invisible by Rajee Samarasinghe. Winner of the Truer Than Fiction Award at the Film Independent Spirit Awards and recipient of the Best Editing Award at CUFF32, the film was shot in secret alongside Tamil civilians still living under military occupation. It follows a mother searching for her vanished son, moving between investigative documentary and allegorical fiction. Through clandestine collaboration and poetic rigor, Samarasinghe constructs a film that expands the possibilities of political cinema while bearing witness to histories often erased from official record.

“Cinema is a sacred space for resistance and collective memory,” said Taila Howe, Director of Production at the Chicago Underground Film Festival. “This inaugural Underground program reflects that commitment by doing what CUFF has always done: uplifting artist-driven work that challenges dominant narratives and insists on being experienced together.”

This first program embodies CUFF’s ongoing commitment to artist-centered cinema, historical preservation, and public dialogue. Presented in partnership with FACETS, the program underscores the festival’s role in sustaining alternative exhibition spaces and amplifying voices that exist outside commercial frameworks.

Tickets and full program details are available here. Members of The Underground attend free and receive access to the virtual screening.

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