Now in our 24th year, the Chicago Underground Film Festival, the longest running “underground” film festival in the world, is an internationally recognized program providing a venue for documentary, experimental and avant-garde narrative film and video. The festival’s mission is to select and screen film, video and related works presenting a diverse line up of moving image programming focusing on filmmakers working to reinvent and explore new approaches to established practices, to foster new forms of media art and to build an audience for such work. Our goal is to achieve these aims by presenting a fun, user-friendly and accessible event..if you suspect your film is “underground,” it probably is.

“I sometimes keep to one shot for a long time. A certain tension builds up between the beginning and the end of that shot, which immediately looks like fiction. It is indeed difficult to escape from fiction. But in the same way it’s also difficult to escape from the documentary style.” —Chantal Akerman.

GAZE invites submissions for Certain Tension, a tribute to Chantal Akerman’s vision and practice in exploring tensions between documentary and fiction. With this exploratory homage, we invite films and videos that extend or critique Akerman’s work. The call is open to short form films, videos, or installations that draw on the themes of Akerman’s legacy––personal explorations that entangle with social issues, the relation between personal memory and political history, the cinematic experience of time, and the interweaving of fiction and documentary.

RE/NIGHT/LIVE/MARE will re- consider your nightmares; will re- examine your daydreams; will re- contextualize pre-existing (video art? videotaped performance work? found footage?) through re- presenting, re- editing, re -mixing. We are specifically interested in works that re- search, re- consider, re- examine, re- contextualize nightmares, daydreams, flying-fancies, hyper-realities. We are also interested in live re- mixing pre- existing work with new live footage to re- consider it in under the cold, hard, clinical (or soft warm fuzzy *wicked grin ) light of the telematic screen.