Cautionary satires by two Chicago filmmakers this fall draw inspiration from town’s tech sector. Of their motion pictures, Brandon Daley and Jake Myers each observe characters in search of monetary salvation in a shiny new bubble.
Daley’s “$POSITIONS!” follows a blue collar employee in debt who dangers all on crypto foreign money. In Myers’ “Kombucha” a struggling musician will get a company gig at an organization that makes a bacteria-based beverage however creates a comic book HR horror present.
Each domestically sourced and set movies display screen on the thirty second Chicago Underground Movie Competition, which opens Wednesday and runs by Sept. 21. Co-founded by Bryan Wendorf, the 2025 version of this maverick nonprofit fest strains up 26 options and 38 shorts (lengths vary from two minutes to over three hours). Wendorf expects about 60 filmmakers to attend viewers talkbacks after exhibiting their work.
Solar-Instances movie critic Roger Ebert wrote in 1996: “A ticket to the Chicago Underground Movie Competition doesn’t simply get you admission to the movies; it’s admission to a subculture.” The fest nonetheless hypes its “genre-defying, groundbreaking” fare and carries the requisite warning: “Some movies in our program include mature themes or difficult content material… viewer discretion is suggested.”
Daley admits his movie “$Positions” certainly challenges audiences: “We get walkouts loads,” stated the Salina, Kansas native, who double-majored in movie and economics at Northwestern College. “Folks simply stroll out of the film within the center `trigger it will get too anxiousness inducing.” At an Austin, Texas pageant, “A kind of folks walked again in for the Q&A so she may inform me that she didn’t just like the movie. And that was cool.”
One arguably gross scene — maybe impressed by the 1995 movie “Billy Madison” starring Adam Sandler — comprises urine. “I’ve seen that film a whole lot of instances,” stated Daley. “I aspire to make motion pictures like ‘Billy Madison’ however I want to make issues which can be grounded in one thing deeper.”
Daley dabbled in crypto through the pandemic. “I view crypto as being a form of chaotic impartial agent in my life and on the planet,” stated the 35-year-old filmmaker. “I wished to make a film about small city folks and the way they’re viewing this as their solution to get out of poverty. I might a lot relatively or not it’s crypto than Fentanyl.”
Whereas Daley attracts upon hardships of his Midwest household — and dedicates his movie to them – Myers, an Ottawa, In poor health. native who will flip 40 at his Chicago Underground Movie Fest showcase, incorporates his personal excessive tech experiences on the coast. He had hoped to make it in Hollywood after making three movies right here that went nowhere.
“I did dwell in L.A for a 12 months and I used to be slated to direct a film, however you understand L.A. needs you to do something aside from direct a film,” stated Myers, whose day job now’s instructing video manufacturing to highschool college students. “I ended up doing movement graphics and the cash was nice, however that wasn’t why I went there.”
Los Angeles not less than equipped materials for “Kombucha,” co-written with Geoff Bakken. The poisonous ingredient in Myers’ horror train is discovered within the bottles of blood-specked bacterial beverage. A struggling musician enters a excessive tech tradition the place microdosing and Ketamine are trending. He’s supplied a startling $107K wage as a Tradition Advisor at Symbio, a B2B consulting agency. A company workplace showroom at 111 South Wacker functioned as Myers’s set.
After dutifully ingesting the workplace model of kombucha and present process physique remakes, Symbio’s creativity-enhanced staff are oddly clone-like.
The boss tells new hires: “One of many nice tragedies of our time is how the underemployed liberal arts majors are toiling away in menial jobs, distracted by goals of stardom once they actually don’t have any probability of success. In the meantime, the company world is run by finance and engineering majors with zero creativeness or empathy.”
Myers cites Spike Jonze’s movie “Adaptation” as an enormous affect. “It was all about storytelling and it was concurrently experimental with all of those heady concepts and likewise simply actually silly characters and actually, like, impulsive characters that couldn’t management themselves,” he stated. “You don’t should be imply to your viewer. Like, you need to give them one thing. You want to make one thing that truly has some form of visceral response with folks.”
Viscera is certainly delivered.
