Cinema Chicago

The 58th Chicago International Film Festival, North America’s longest-running competitive film festival, today announced the winners of its 2022 edition in categories including International Feature Film Competition, New Directors Competition, International Documentary Competition, OutLook Competition, and Short Film Competitions, as well as the Chicago Award for an outstanding program in the Festival’s City & State program, and the Roger Ebert Award, awarded to a film competing in the New Directors Competition in recognition of a filmmaker with a fresh and uncompromising vision.[…]

We are beyond excited to welcome alum, Alex Phillips, back to the festival this year with his debut feature, All Jacked Up and Full of Worms. It is a surrealist and vibrantly twisted tale that follows a trio as they careen down a rabbit hole after ingesting hallucinogenic earthworms. Riveting though highly disturbing, the film is not meant to induce pleasure, but instead repulsion and even anger. It is an absolute trip. 

You wrote this film as well as directed it.[…]

Women laced into tightly wrought corsets; femme fatales shrouded in shadow; a precocious detective with a sharp wit. Each image evokes something particular, connects to a collective association with a specific genre. This association comes with preexisting knowledge, an awareness about what symmetries define that genre and what it means or represents as a category. This recognizability can be both helpful and detrimental, the latter happening when something gets too bogged down in tropes and conventions rather than its own narrative.[…]