Shorts Program | Select filmmakers scheduled to attend. | Stories on migration, belonging, and the places we call home.

Feature Film | The first feature directed by a Black woman, Jessie Maple’s 1981 WILL tells a Harlem story of redemption, marking Loretta Devine’s unforgettable screen debut.

Shorts Program | Select filmmakers scheduled to attend. | Ten portraits of Black men and boys tracing the art of becoming across generations and geographies.

Shorts Program | Select filmmakers scheduled to attend. | An eclectic late-night ride for the nocturnal.

Feature Film | Five Black Chicagoans, each carrying the impact of incarceration, journey to Benin through the Restore Fellowship to reclaim history and reimagine repair and liberation at the source.

Shorts Program | Select filmmakers scheduled to attend. | In this shorts program, horror and speculative cinema become portals where the future is here, and the past walks beside us.

Feature Film | A soulful chronicle of Chicago’s house music—its powerful roots and its echoes, and its power to move the world through rhythm, memory, and joy.

Shorts Program | Select filmmakers scheduled to attend. | Experimental cinema on the edge of Black possibility.

Feature Film | Kahlil Joseph’s long-anticipated feature expands his acclaimed BLKNWS project into a cinematic experience. Using archival fragments, music, and new media, the film reframes the news cycle through the lens of Black life, imagination, and possibility. Dialogue: followed by an onstage conversation with director Kahlil Joseph and the Visionary Award presentation.

Shorts Program | Select filmmakers scheduled to attend. | Six portraits of Black women and girls tracing the art of becoming across generations and geographies.

Shorts Program | Select filmmakers scheduled to attend. | Stories from Chicago’s very own take the center.

Special Event | Peer into the unknown, embrace the ambiguity, and show up to the Film Center for a screening that is entirely, absolutely, and completely “to be announced”—quite literally until the moment the lights go down.