CIX: Lab Projects
The Chicago Industry Exchange (CIX), hosted by Cinema/Chicago and the Chicago International Film Festival, invites filmmakers with narrative fiction feature films to participate in CIX:Lab. CIX:Lab is a year-long creative development program, focused on script development, directing and visualization, and preproduction and pitching, finally culminating in The Pitch at Industry Days in fall 2025, where the filmmakers will pitch their projects in front of a live audience and a panel of industry judges and have private meetings with producers, financiers, and distributors.
The selected projects for 2024-2025 CIX: Lab are:
Caterpillar Girls
Writer/Director: Wendy Roderweiss
About two best friends, Heidi and Alex, and set against the backdrop of Chicago’s late ‘80s underground music scene, Caterpillar Girls focuses on the beautiful and wretched hellscape of life as a 15-year-old girl, and on the bendy lines of truth and trust that come with deeply intimate friendships.
Mosque4Mosque
Director: Sophiyaa Nayar
Writer: Abbas Salem
Mama doesn’t always know best. What begins as a relentlessly caring Syrian mother’s absurd but harmless attempts to find her son the perfect Muslim boy, escalates into an investigation of what it means to be Arab-American before and after Trump’s inauguration.
A Phone Call to Wisconsin
Writer/Director: MC Plaschke
Producer: ME Monda
When Jess gets her heartbroken by her dream girl, she starts to use a phone line meant to help LGBTQ+ teens to heal her broken heart, while trying to convince the person on the other end of the line to fall in love with her (who just happens to be her former high school bully).
Someday, Ohio
Director: Meghann Artes
Writer: Anna Hozian
Producer: Joe Lyons
A tough con artist from the Bronx gets waylaid in a small town and seizes the opportunity to scam its residents, but along the way she finds the only place she has ever really belonged.
A Terrible Sound
Writer/Director: Shiloh Tumo Washington
Producer: Fabiola Auxila
Upon moving up to Chicago from a small, midwestern town in 1959, an innovative jazz pianist finds himself en vogue, in love, and with a new, piercing addiction.
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