This year’s edition of the Onion City Film Festival (formerly the Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival) holds together nicely. Several clear themes emerge from the four-day event: the experience of women and other underrepresented groups, revolutionary politics, the relationship between people and their environments, and the humorous possibilities of experimenting with the film form. Curator Emily Eddy has wisely spread these themes evenly across the nine programs, so attendees can get a sampling of each no matter what day they go. In fact several themes appear in each program, barring a couple of exceptions. Thursday’s opening night program, “Histories & Futures,” contains work solely by female filmmakers, while program six, “The Vibrating World,” playing Sunday at 3:30 PM, is devoted exclusively to films about travel.
The shorts that play before and after We Were Hardly More Than Children also consider movingly various underrepresented experiences. Kym McDaniel’s Exit Strategy #4 deals with the filmmaker’s history with an eating disorder, Cecilia Doughtery’s Joe features writer Joe Westmoreland reading a story about experiencing anti-gay bullying in high school, and in the work In Conversation With Venus and Octavia Xitlalli Sixta-Tarin presents a direct-camera confession about being a transwoman alongside similarly framed confessions from Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning.
Thu 3/21-Sun 3/24, times vary; see website, Chicago Filmmakers, 5720 N Ridge, 773-293-1447, onioncityfilmfest.org, single ticket $8, festival pass $50.
