Strange

Chicago 10(en)

Archival footage, animation and music are used to look back at the eight anti-war protesters who were put on trial following the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

William S. Burroughs Birthday Bash(en)

To celebrate the 100th birthday of America's most audacious writer, William S. Burroughs, Chicago Humanities Festival brings together a motley crew of poets, writers, and musicians. William Seward Burroughs (1914 - 1997) was an American writer and visual artist. He was a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author whose influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs's needs took him across the United States, down into Mexico, to Europe and beyond. On his travels, he meets up with various members of the underground drug and "outcast" cultures.

Beat Angel(en)

Jack Kerouac returns to earth as an angel with the goal of changing the life of a struggling writer.

Pull My Daisy(en)

Based on an incident in the life of Beat icon Neal Cassady and his wife, the painter Carolyn, the film tells the story of a railway brakeman whose wife invites a respected bishop over for dinner. However, the brakeman's Bohemian friends crash the party, with comic results. Pull My Daisy is a film that typifies the Beat Generation. Directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, Daisy was adapted by Jack Kerouac from the third act of his play, Beat Generation; Kerouac also provided improvised narration.

Living on the Edge: The Poetic Works of Gérald Leblanc(fr)

A child of the Beat Generation, Gérald Leblanc conjoined urban-ness and American-ness, wandering and belonging, far beyond the boundaries of taboo. In so doing, he helped propel Acadia into the modern era.

Black Lodge(en)

Set in a nightmarish Bardo, a place between death and rebirth, a tormented writer faces down demons of his own making. Forced to confront the darkest moment in his life, he mines fractured and repressed memories for a way out. A woman is at the center of all the writer’s afterlife encounters. She is the subject of his life’s greatest regret, and she materializes everywhere in this Otherworld. The writer cannot detach any thoughts of his life from her.

Sing! Fight! Sing! Fight! From LeRoi to Amiri(en)

The story of how Everett Leroy Jones became Amiri Baraka, from his childhood to the mid '60s, is told through interviews recorded in the late '90s.

Big Sur(en)

Big Sur is a film adaptation of the Jack Kerouac autobiographical novel of the same name.

The Subterraneans(en)

A disillusioned writer explores the subterranean depths of San Francisco's North Beach district.

A Line a Day Must Be Enough!(en)

In a film bursting with lyrics, pictures, and music the director shows us a way into the peculiar universe of Tóroddur, and the otherwise not very talkative artist gives us a glimpse of his thoughts on art, God, life and death.

Howl(tr)

Howl is an homage to the reading rituals of the Beat poets, to Wholly Communion, to 1965, to Allen Ginsberg, to Jack Kerouac, to William Burroughs, to all those books that we believe to be published in heaven, and to all the restless spirits, from these lands. The film documents the translator of the poem Howl into Turkish, accompanied by a musician.

Odd Børretzen: Mer enn helt all right(no)

A portrait of Norwegian poet Odd Børretzen in his own words, featuring musical highlights from Børretzen's work with musicians Alf Cranner and Lars Martin Myhre.

Tinta Film(es)

The Honey Bee(en)

Beat poem parable to black youth.

Newness(en)

In contemporary Los Angeles, two millennials navigating a social media–driven hookup culture begin a relationship that pushes both emotional and physical boundaries.

Love Jones(en)

Darius Lovehall is a young black poet in Chicago who starts dating Nina Moseley, a beautiful and talented photographer. While trying to figure out if they've got a "love thing" or are just "kicking it," they hang out with their friends, talking about love and sex. Then Nina tests the strength of Darius' feelings and sets a chain of romantic complications into motion.

All of You(en)

Laura and Simon have been best friends since college. Over the years, they've realized their bond is more than platonic. Can they—and should they—risk everything to explore a love that has existed all along?

Adult World(en)

Amy, a naive college graduate who believes she's destined to be a great poet, begrudgingly accepts a job at a sex shop while she pursues a mentorship with reclusive writer Rat Billings.

Beat Street(en)

An aspiring DJ, from the South Bronx, and his best friend, a promoter, try to get into show business by exposing people to hip-hop music and culture.

Naked Lunch(en)

Blank-faced bug killer Bill Lee and his dead-eyed wife, Joan, like to get high on Bill's pest poisons while lounging with Beat poet pals. After meeting the devilish Dr. Benway, Bill gets a drug made from a centipede. Upon indulging, he accidentally kills Joan, takes orders from his typewriter-turned-cockroach, ends up in a constantly mutating Mediterranean city and learns that his hip friends have published his work -- which he doesn't remember writing.

Mo' Better Blues(en)

Talented but self-centered trumpeter Bleek Gilliam is obsessed with his music and indecisiveness about his girlfriends Indigo and Clarke. But when he is forced to come to the aid of his manager and childhood friend, Bleek finds his world more fragile than he ever imagined.

The Unforgivable(en)

A woman is released from prison after serving a sentence for a violent crime and re-enters a society that refuses to forgive her past.

Bodied(en)

A progressive graduate student finds success and sparks outrage when his interest in battle rap as a thesis subject becomes a competitive obsession.

Kill Your Darlings(en)

A murder in 1944 draws together the great poets of the beat generation: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs.

Happythankyoumoreplease(en)

Captures a generational moment - young people on the cusp of truly growing up, tiring of their reflexive cynicism, each in their own ways struggling to connect and define what it means to love and be loved. Six New Yorkers juggle love, friendship, and the keenly challenging specter of adulthood. Sam Wexler is a struggling writer who's having a particularly bad day. When a young boy gets separated from his family on the subway, Sam makes the questionable decision to bring the child back to his apartment and thus begins a rewarding, yet complicated, friendship. Sam's life revolves around his friends — Annie, whose self-image keeps her from commitment; Charlie and Mary Catherine, a couple whose possible move to Los Angeles tests their relationship; and Mississippi, a cabaret singer who catches Sam's eye.

Players(en)

New York sportswriter Mack has spent years devising successful hook-up "plays" with her friends, but when she unexpectedly falls for one of her targets, she must learn what it takes to go from simply scoring to playing for keeps.

Fire with Fire(en)

A tough, street-smart kid serving a sentence in a state youth reformatory meets a beautiful, innocent girl studying at a nearby convent. When forbidden love blossoms between them, they must fight the prison authorities, their parents and the law.

My Fake Boyfriend(en)

A young man in a tricky situation follows the advice of his unconventional best friend and uses social media to create a fake boyfriend to keep his awful ex-lover out of his life. But everything backfires when he meets the real love of his life, and breaking up with his fake boyfriend proves hard to do.

Step Up 3D(en)

A tight-knit group of New York City street dancers, including Luke and Natalie, team up with NYU freshman Moose, and find themselves pitted against the world's best hip-hop dancers in a high-stakes showdown that will change their lives forever.

On the Edge(en)

A suicidal young man is committed to a Dublin psychiatric hospital where he meets new friends who greatly influence his life.

Beats(en)

An agoraphobic hip-hop prodigy and a disgraced former music manager cross paths in Chicago’s South Side and help each other face demons of their pasts.

For Colored Girls(en)

About existence from the perspective of 20 nameless black females. Each of the women portray one of the characters represented in the collection of twenty poems, revealing different issues that impact women in general and women of color in particular.

Boy Meets Girl(en)

In Kentucky, a transgender woman and her best male friend lament the lack of eligible partners and step across old boundaries of love and romance.

The First Time(en)

A spark of attraction smolders, then ignites, between two teens from different high schools who meet by chance at a party.