Best of the Chicago Underground Film Festival 2025

Award Winners: Best of the Chicago Underground Film Festival 2025

This program brings together four award-winning works from the 2025 Chicago Underground Film Festival, spanning speculative fiction, archival excavation, political documentary, and hybrid nonfiction. Collectively, these films examine labor, memory, disappearance, and resistance—using cinema as a tool for cultural inquiry and historical recovery.

The evening opens with three short films that approach social systems from radically different angles: a 16mm sci-fi satire about technological “solutions” in cooperative spaces; a video essay resurrecting a forgotten chapter of Chicago’s underground film history; and an archival documentary chronicling New York squatters who transformed abandonment into collective survival. A post-shorts Q&A with Isaac Brooks, Josh B. Mabe, and Ben Creech will explore process, collaboration, and the role of alternative exhibition in preserving marginalized stories.

The program concludes with Rajee Samarasinghe’s internationally acclaimed debut feature, a formally daring hybrid documentary confronting enforced disappearances in post–civil war Sri Lanka. Blending investigative nonfiction with allegorical fiction, the film expands the possibilities of political cinema while bearing witness to histories often erased from official record.

Together, these works reflect CUFF’s ongoing commitment to artist-driven cinema, historical preservation, and films that challenge dominant narratives—presented as a shared public experience.

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