Chicago Underground Film Festival Takes Center Stage with Its 33rd Edition This Week

Fall festival season is ready for liftoff and it all begins with one of the longest running underground film festivals in the world. The Chicago Underground Film Festival (CUFF) 33rd edition runs September 23–27 at the Gene Siskel Film Center and the Harper Theater. The program presents more than 100 films from 22 countries, including four World Premieres and major new works from internationally acclaimed and emerging filmmakers. Selected from a record 2,904 submissions representing filmmakers from 100 countries and territories, the 2026 program is one of the most internationally diverse and formally ambitious lineups in the festival’s history.

CUFF33 opens Wednesday, September 23 at the Gene Siskel Film Center with the Midwest Premiere of NOVA ’78, directed by Aaron Brookner and Rodrigo Areias. Drawn from the long-lost archive of filmmaker Howard Brookner and painstakingly restored over more than a decade, the film resurrects the legendary 1978 Nova Convention, an unprecedented gathering where dozens of artists, musicians, poets and filmmakers including William S. Burroughs, Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, Frank Zappa, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Glass, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Anne Waldman and Timothy Leary converged for three extraordinary days in New York’s East Village. More than a historical document, NOVA ’78 captures underground culture inventing itself in real time, preserving a moment when literature, music, performance, experimental film, and radical thought collided to redefine the possibilities of contemporary art. 

The festival concludes Sunday, September 27 at the Gene Siskel Film Center with the World Premiere of A Stranger Has No Eyes, the extraordinary new documentary from C. S. Nicholson, whose acclaimed short The Discoverer of the Discoverers screened at CUFF30. Set in contemporary Benin, the film follows Martine de Souza, a descendant of one of history’s most notorious slave traders, as she publicly confronts her family’s legacy while navigating inherited power, contested land rights, and the enduring consequences of colonialism. Structured through mesmerizing Vodun possession ceremonies in which ancestors and the enslaved return through the living, the film transforms history into lived experience, collapsing past and present into a haunting meditation on memory, justice and spiritual survival.

CUFF continues its longstanding commitment to cinema that resists easy categorization, bringing together narrative features, documentaries, artist’s films, experimental animation, hybrid works, and expanded cinema from established innovators and emerging filmmakers alike.

“Every year we’re reminded that the most exciting films aren’t simply telling different stories, they’re discovering different ways to make cinema. Whether documentary, narrative, animation, or something that refuses those categories altogether, these works share a belief that form and meaning can’t be separated. They ask audiences not just to watch differently, but to think differently. That’s the tradition CUFF has championed for more than thirty years, and this year’s filmmakers continue it in remarkable ways.” says Artistic Director Bryan Wendorf

World Premieres

The festival’s World Premieres highlight adventurous new voices working across narrative, documentary, and hybrid forms. Parker Corey’s Nightgame, the debut feature from the founding member and producer of the critically acclaimed hip-hop groups Injury Reserve and By Storm, transforms internet paranoia into  unsettling digital noir. Chicago filmmaker Elijah Valter’s Moth expands the American road movie into a dreamlike journey through physical and virtual landscapes. Minneapolis filmmaker Rolf Henrik Dogs Belgum returns with Woolve, his first feature in nearly two decades, following his inclusion in the 2000 Whitney Biennial and CUFF-honored films Driver 23 and The Atlas Moth. The festival concludes with the World Premiere of C. S. Nicholson’s A Stranger Has No Eyes.

Features

Narrative

The narrative feature lineup ranges from James N. Kienitz Wilkins’ digitally constructed satire The Misconceived and Leonardo Pirondi’s luminous science-fiction reverie Tropical Fractals to Rob Rice’s quietly unsettling Ponderosa, Brooke H. Cellars’ body-horror fantasia Cramps! A Period Piece, and Alice Voena’s trans punk odyssey Heaven Above Rowen.

Documentary and Experimental

Acclaimed filmmaker Lynne Sachs returns with Every Contact Leaves a Trace; a deeply personal meditation on memory, history, and chance encounters that exemplifies her uniquely lyrical approach to nonfiction filmmaking. Additional documentary and experimental features include Anat Even’s urgent Collapse; Fil Ieropoulos’ kaleidoscopic queer essay Uchronia: Parallel Histories of Queer Revolt; Damien Chen’s luminous coming-of-age portrait Always; Tommy Nickoloff’s You Fuckers Figure It Out: A Jason Molina Story; Marne Lucas and Tyler Hubby’s Ecstasies in Monochrome, accompanied by a 30th anniversary screening of Lucas’ award-winning infrared erotica The Operation. Chicago filmmaker Ines Sommer’s The Fair, an ethnographic portrait of rural America that finds extraordinary rituals and traditions hidden within the everyday.Daniel Carlson’s feature-length documentary What Is De Poezenkrant… and Why Is Everyone Talking About It? celebrates Dutch artist Piet Schreuders and the remarkable fifty-year history of his handmade underground publication.

Shorts

Across three decades, CUFF has built an international reputation as one of North America’s leading showcases for short-form cinema. This year’s thirteen programs feature more than 100 films spanning animation, documentary, experimental film, music, horror, political cinema and hybrid practice.

Highlights include new work from Cecelia Condit, Bill Morrison, Rajee Samarasinghe, Maryam Tafakory, Bruce Bickford, Stephanie Barber, TT Takemoto, Miranda Pennell, Angelo Madsen, Dominic Angerame, Alison Nguyen, Mike Olenick, and Lev Kalman & Whitney Horn. Chicago is prominently represented by Driven, featuring Tony Fitzpatrick’s final screen performance; and Liv Mershon’s Strange Egg. Music, horror, and animation run throughout the shorts lineup, with films exploring Bob Dylan’s filmmaking, Albert Maysles and the Beatles, Miami noise legends Harry Pussy, and Black women in punk, alongside Michael Dougherty’s newly restored Season’s Greetings, the short that first introduced Sam, later the iconic figure at the center of the Trick ‘r Treat franchise.

Tickets for the 33rd Chicago Underground Film Festival will be available at www.cuff.org beginning Friday August 14.

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