With our first show of 2025 last night – Good-by Keiichi Tanaami: Animation from the Pop Subconscious – we kicked off our new season, which comprises monthly screenings at 2220 Arts + Archives (as usual) through May! We’re already working out some Summer and Fall plans, but in the meantime, we hope we’ll see you at some of our upcoming shows, beginning with Zena’s Tom Palazzolo show on Thursday, February 6!
Tom Palazzolo is a Chicago legend, still very active at 87 years of age, and we’re both longtime fans. His decidedly Midwestern take on America, its complex identity, and the things about it that charm, beguile, confuse, and disturb us all intermingle in his incredibly insightful and entertaining short documentaries. Tom has been making films since the 1960s, and our show comprises only a small fraction of his incredible output, but it’s a selection Zena chose particularly to think about America and its contradictory and troubled state in our current political/historical moment. It also seemed only fitting not only to include his bitingly witty film America’s in Real Trouble in the program, but to even name the program after that film.
Ultimately, I think what we both love about Tom’s films is that they’re incisive, political, and critical, but embedded in a sensibility of incredible wit, charm, humor, and (dare I say it!) love. His curiosity and empathy for the American working-class experience is a defining quality of his work and what makes the films so effective and generous. We’re confident this program will be a rich, thought-provoking, and yet entertaining experience!
Beyond February, we have programs devoted to Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s amazing metatextual experimental feature Salaam Cinema on March 6, Ula Stöckl & Edgar Reitz’s nearly undefinable and legendary Tales of the Dumpster Kid (complete with audience curatorial participation!) on April 17, and a mixed program we’re very excited about on May 15, 16mm Brain Food, in which we’ll insist that a regular dose of imaginative and intricate 16mm film viewing can be healthy for our minds and souls. (plus if people like this program, we may just make it a regular thing!)
And beyond our Lightstruck shows, we each occasionally do screenings at other venues in other contexts, such as the Phil Solomon screening Mark is doing at the Academy Museum on January 30. You can keep track of any upcoming shows we’re doing – Lightstruck and otherwise – on our Current Screenings page.
Hope to see you at a show soon!
LIGHTSTRUCK 