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.

Feature Film | A lyrical portrait of Black farmers in the American South, tracing land, lineage, and loss. Shyne captures quiet acts of care and resistance as families fight to preserve the soil and their story.

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. | Stories on migration, belonging, and the places we call home.

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. | From blood to chosen, this collection of shorts honors tenderness and ties across generations and geographies. 

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.