Local filmmakers, horror & desire are all given the spotlight at the Chicago International Film Festival’s shorts program.

This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the work being covered here wouldn’t exist.

The first program of shorts featured at this year’s Chicago International Film Festival, titled “City & State,” highlighted local voices with astounding range. Dustin Nakao-Haider’s film Ethan Lim: Cambodian Futures is a poignant and complex film highlighting Chicago chef Ethan Lim and his hope for a different future that moves Cambodian food in revolutionary directions. Director Linh Tran’s Video Funeral grapples with similar issues of loss, (re)connection, and family brought about by diaspora. Like Linh Tran, Ian Kelly’s animated short Soft Lights and Silver Shadows is a tender testament to how art and media can help transcend time, distance, and mortality. Equally fascinated with different domestic dynamics, Tetsuya Mariko intently investigated what makes a family against crumbling infrastructure in his tense Before Anyone Else.

For me, McKenzie Chinn’s A Real One is the short that best uses and challenges the idea of city and state. Her heart-rending film is about two friends, Lauren and Keisha, from the South Side of Chicago, who find comfort and safety with each other. In its sixteen minutes, Chinn packs a complicated and human punch, one steeped in class and racial consciousness. Without any sense of moralism, Chinn puts her plot in proper socio-economic and gender contexts so that our connection and understanding of her characters are instant and profound. Tackling these complex ideas are two astounding actresses who can navigate the emotionally fraught scenario before coming to rest together on the front stoop.

The second program of shorts at this year’s festival, simply titled “Desire,” travels inwards with its animation of desire and the psyche. Nienke Deutz’s The Miracle presents a middle-aged woman’s journey towards embracing her child-free life with a gentle and flickering mix of animation style that adds depth of field and both metaphorical and literal transparency to her perspective. We catapult from the purely subjective short towards the universal with Osman Cerfon’s Aaah!, a rhythmic and hilarious celebration of the sounds of childhood we all know and understand — screaming. But then come the fraught situations of adulthood, as explored in 27 by Flóra Anna Buda, a painterly pastel story of a young woman’s unsure entry into life’s hypocrisies. If we can grow to embrace life’s queer contradictions, we might go to Maurice’s Bar, one of Paris’ first queer bars, to take in a bit of Tzor Edery & Tom Prezman’s bawdy Sailor Jerry cabaret. Should the lurking policeman decide to break up the fun, we could always call on American Sikh Vishavjit Singh’s resilient post-9/11 superhero and fighter of injustice.

It’s Patricio Plaza’s Carne de Dios that brings all these themes together for a kaleidoscopic and terrifying journey into the heart of colonialism’s darkness. When a priest arrives as the indigenous healer, he gets more than he bargained for with her medicine. Her magic potion sinks him into a psychedelic confrontation with his soul. Filled with a bold mix of Catholic and indigenous imagery, this film shows that sometimes syncretism can happen in reverse, allowing long-oppressed forces to reemerge from the so-called unconscious.

Horror frequently plunges into the depths of our inner selves. For a few of the shorts in CIFF’s After Dark series, “Twisted Tales and Shadows of Innocence,” that carnal self-knowledge is quite literal. In Olivia Loccisano’s First Blood, a young girl (Lauryn Sa in a delicious performance) awakens to a changing body. She learns not only how to accept her body but even comes to radically devour herself. Daphne Gardner’s In The Flesh also unclogs trauma and allows its protagonist to taste a new kind of self-love. In Consumer, Stephanie Izsak’s contemporary fable about body image, the young protagonist also eats her way to a horrifying conclusion, one that gives new meaning to an old, familiar phrase. Sweet Tooth starts with children playing an ordinary board game but then, anchored by an incisive performance from its young lead, Lou Deleuze, director Joséphine Darcy Hopkins expertly unravels the rules to reveal a horror lesson in class, sacrifice, and triumph. Michael Gabriele’s Get Away similarly plays with the rules of the horror game by taking a classic genre setup and containing it within a self-referential loop bound by the metaphysics of old media.

But it’s Kristine Gerolaga’s Mosquito Lady that brings it all home to roost with its astounding mix of folklore and horror. When a young woman realizes she’s pregnant and doesn’t want to keep her baby, she’s afraid of what her conservative Filipino will say. But then she remembers her parents warning about the house down the street, said to be haunted by a demon from the old country. When she arrives at the woman’s door, more is crossed than the threshold. What follows is a horrifying and jaw-dropping inversion of folklore that mixes cultural history and practical effects to tell a fresh and contemporary story about gender, choice, and fate.