Chicago International Film Festival presents BP Shorts: Southside Spotlight

The Chicago International Film Festival presents “BP Shorts: Southside Spotlight,” a program of five films rooted largely in Chicago while reaching beyond it. These films offer distinct portraits of Black life across form and experience, finding space for confrontation, tenderness, experimentation, and the histories carried with us.

Featured Films

The program includes five recent films from the Festival’s editions. BAILEY’S BLUES (2025, Shiloh Tumo Washington) features a Chicago-born blues musician whose interview with a French journalist becomes a charged conversation about the music business, race, and society. CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER DAY (2023, Bronzeville Collective) follows a Juneteenth floral installation in a poetic portrait of community gathering. ALL THE LOVE I COULD HANDLE (2025, Ruby Rose Collins) is inspired by the life of filmmaker Kathleen Collins, exploring a woman balancing her artistic career and single motherhood. ABOUT TIME (2024, Donald Conley) depicts ex-lovers Lamar and Sidney reconnecting in a tender reckoning with their past. NOT DEAD (MORTO NÃO) (2025, Alex Reis) is an experimental film blending animation and live-action, meditating on W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk from the perspective of new parents.

Black Perspectives at 30

This shorts program is part of a larger celebration of the Chicago International Film Festival’s Black Perspectives program, now in its 30th year. The series, titled Through the Lens, looks back at some of the most resonant Black stories to grace the Festival’s screens, celebrating the extraordinary breadth of Black cinema and the generations of filmmakers who have shaped this legacy.

62nd Chicago International Film Festival – Highlights

Accessibility and Presentation

The presentation will be projected without open captions. The theater is hearing-loop equipped. For accessibility requests, please email [email protected]. The Film Center is ADA accessible.