(Filmmakers in person)

Nomadic Videomaker Emma Piper-Burket joins us with her new film , a powerful personal documentary of crisis folding in contemporary Iraq.  Piper-Burket writes, “Two years ago Diana was living on her own in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan’s buzzing capital city. She was studying to be a flight attendant and enjoying the freedom of being independent and young in a growing city. When ISIS and war returned to Iraq she moved back to her mother’s home in Sulaymaniyah. Now her days pass quietly, mostly indoors. In the darkness of frequent power outages, Diana builds a dream city in her mind.”

Opening the evening is Tucson’s diasporic Irish media artist Cáit Ní Síomón with two recent videos drawing from her years in Chicago. No News from Chicago is a silent narrative shot guerrilla style in McCormick Place, the largest convention center in North America. It is a document of four individuals trying to make sense of the highly codified and homogenous world of the “non-place,” when stripped bare of its function of commerce and trade. Beneath the Pavement is a psychoanalytic study of the experience of nature within contemporary technological landscapes. The essay traces the history of an area in the south loop of Chicago from early settlement expansion to the last plot of undeveloped land within the city limits, nicknamed the “Brownlands.”