Jenna Kalishman

Settled, just after midnight and pushing past my own exhaustion (post my nine-hour drive), in the darkened Egyptian theater for my first screening this festival, I was brought to life by a resounding opening sequence, foreboding swollen in the room. The first great moment for the film lands in the robust score here, intricately tonal and swirling with an intimidating ambiance, framing the descent to come.
Run Rabbit Run begins and ends with its characters. Sarah (Sarah Snook) is a repressive ...

Approaching its documentary material from a pseudo-narrative, King Coal is dedicated to telling its audience about the real Appalachia: its mythology and magic and heart, found in both people and earth. King Coal is not merely a history; it is a ghost story, an exercise in remembrance, and a cinematic archive.
Academy Award-nominated director Elaine McMillion Sheldon knows this ancient land down to its bones as she calls it home. It is her own lilting speech that guides the film and our atten...

Shot on film that lends it an oh-so-comforting grainy warmth, Theater Camp invokes all those summers spent at sleepaway camps, where memories were recorded on fuzzy disposable cameras, to be developed and reminisced over months later. A collaboration between friends and co-directors Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman (alongside fellow screenwriters Ben Platt and Noah Galvin), this balmy, sweet mockumentary feels as though it was yanked from the combined collective consciousness belonging to Jewi...

We are beyond excited to welcome alum, Alex Phillips, back to the festival this year with his debut feature, All Jacked Up and Full of Worms. It is a surrealist and vibrantly twisted tale that follows a trio as they careen down a rabbit hole after ingesting hallucinogenic earthworms. Riveting though highly disturbing, the film is not meant to induce pleasure, but instead repulsion and even anger. It is an absolute trip.
You wrote this film as well as directed it. What was the inspiration behi...

Women laced into tightly wrought corsets; femme fatales shrouded in shadow; a precocious detective with a sharp wit. Each image evokes something particular, connects to a collective association with a specific genre. This association comes with preexisting knowledge, an awareness about what symmetries define that genre and what it means or represents as a category. This recognizability can be both helpful and detrimental, the latter happening when something gets too bogged down in tropes and ...

Cinema/Chicago News
We are incredibly excited to be hosting Finnish filmmaker and poet Mikko Myllylahti at the festival this year. His film The Woodcutter Story, also shown at Cannes this year, is set in an unnamed Finnish timber village in the far north during the pervasively dark winter. Deadline calls the film “deeply melancholy, strange, and surreal.” Myllylahti is both a director and writer and has received prizes for the 2016 film he wrote, The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki.
It ...

Thus far in HBO’s Targaryen-centric Game of Thrones spinoff House of the Dragon, we have already seen powers rise and fall, grow and sicken, bloom and fester. After a brief prologue, Rhaenyra Targaryen (Milly Alcock) arrives on her golden she-dragon Syrax with an unfiltered joy on her face as she dismounts. This joy is fleeting, but she does not know that yet. She cannot possibly know that, in mere days, her father King Viserys Targaryen (Paddy Considine) will make the choice to sacrifice her...

In the swelling opening moments of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, a sun-dappled and baby-faced Galadriel (played here by Amelie Child-Villiers and later by Morfydd Clark) carefully constructs a paper boat beside a stream. This place brimming with light is not Middle-earth but Valinor, the realm across the sea where the Elves first began. Galadriel is quickly taunted by several other young Elves, who seem to be, at the very least, allegorically representing the other Elves in house...

Cinema/Chicago News
Showing her vibrant documentary, Band, we are so thrilled to host Icelandic filmmaker and band member Alfrun Ornolfsdottir at the 58th Chicago International Film Festival. The wonderfully heartfelt documentary follows her own band, an all-female, electro-punk Icelandic group, called Post Performance Blues Band through all their adventures and misadventures as they attempt to become avant-garde pop stars. It is a spunky and delightful ode to dreams and friendship.
What prom...

We are delighted to host Irish filmmaker and journalist Sinead O’Shea along with her film Pray For Our Sinners. The documentary mixes personal storytelling with political exposé, where O’Shea returns to her small hometown to confront historical abuse and neglect in the Catholic Church. More specifically, she delves into the harm caused to women and children in “mother and baby” homes (where unwed mothers were sent to deliver their newborns) and the corresponding resistance...

Preceding the 58th Chicago International Film Festival, which begins on October 12th, Cinema/Chicago is hosting a CineConcert screening of L’Inferno to celebrate the centenary. The 1911 Italian silent film was directed by Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan, and Giuseppe De Liguoro. More information about the screening can be found here.
L’Inferno was the very first feature-length film produced in Italy at 68 minutes. The film interprets Inferno, the first part of the Divine Comedy, a fourtee...

In the newest and bloodiest film from A24, seven privileged friends gather at an isolated mansion to party-out an oncoming hurricane. New lovers, the sweetly accented Bee (Maria Bakalova) and impulsive, newly recovering Sophie (Amandla Stenberg), grin sheepishly at each other as they drive up to the house. When the pair arrives, it becomes clear that their presence is unexpected and complicated. Already hanging out at the pool are hot girl podcaster Alice (Rachel Sennott) and her older fresh-...

There is something breathtaking about the unknown, frightening as it is. It is almost mystifying that though the undiscovered may often be unquantifiable and intimidating in its massiveness, it is unendingly alluring to humankind and we are relentlessly drawn toward it. To be captivated by something so unfathomable and evocative of anxiety is wholly counterintuitive, but can be better understood within the aesthetic and theoretical concept of the sublime. Sublimity has to do with visual experiences ending in complex emotion and the muddling of human instincts, and should be thought of as disti

There is something about being haunted, about ghosts and horror, that is so familiar and comforting to lesbians and sapphics in general. Generally, lesbianism is connected to the supernatural through how non-normative, unstructured, and alternative the genre is; themes like going unseen, being marked as perverse or damaged, or unusual desire are all allegorically connected to real world experiences of sapphicness. This is present in both installments of The Haunting anthology, one of which fe...

In the past year or so, the Twilight films have had a cultural resurgence, delightfully deemed “The Twilight renaissance.” Though its cinematic value may be disputable, its position as a world-tilting global phenomenon – a cultural reset – can hardly be understated. Not only did it launch the careers of two of indie film’s most admirable actors (plus a slew of other stars who everyone has forgotten were in the saga), but it founded an entire subset of culture. People have made thousands of Ti...