This year’s Chicago International Film Festival has officially come to a close. It’s been another incredible year for both newer films and retrospectives on old classics. I’ve had the pleasure of getting to watch 12 films in the past 10 days, which is still astonishingly only around 10% of the over 120 feature films that were screened at this year’s CIFF. There are an incredible number of films that have come out this year and years past. I can only offer but a small slice of the entire festival, but I hope you’ve found some good recommendations through these past few dispatches. Thank you to everyone who has read these. If you’ve read through all 3 you get a gold star from me. Without further ado, here is the last batch of films I saw at this year’s CIFF.

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Cloud (2024)

Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

In this world, it’s either scam or be scammed. The legendary Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, best known for the iconic horror crime film Cure (1997), is back with his latest paranoia-filled thriller Cloud. The film tells the story of Ryosuke Yoshii, an ordinary person who makes a living reselling things online. He carelessly swindles and upsells people for his own gain, leading to small grudges that inevitably coalesce when a community of his haters band together to try and take him down. Kurosawa is well known for his psychological films where ambiguous, mundane, and everyday stories reveal deeper emotional turmoil that leads to true horror. Cloud is his take on the modern day, with anonymous internet communities and online scammers inciting the conflict that creates mental friction between people. The film has its own twisted sense of dark humor, and things quickly go off the rails for Ryosuke as everyone is out to get him for their own personal gain, just as he did to them.

To a Land Unknown (2024)

Director: Mahdi Fleifel

"In a way, it's a sort of fate of Palestinians not to end up where they started, but somewhere unexpected and far away." -Edward Said

To a Land Unknown follows Chatila and Reda, two displaced Palestinians who escaped from a refugee camp in Lebanon and are now stranded in Athens. In order to achieve their dream of reaching Germany to start a new life, they must resort to petty crimes and dark schemes in order to make it out alive.

The saying goes that honor killed the samurai. When born into a world that is cruel and unforgiving, the only way to survive is to compromise your morals and act in your own self interest. The good die young, but the selfish still hope to keep some innocent and pure part of their soul safe, so that when they finally make it out they can still live a life that they can stomach. What do you do when everywhere you go you must be invisible? The world offers you nothing and spits you out if you demand anything for the sake of your survival. "Who do we have but each other?" Asks Reda, but it seems we might not even have that. Trying to help others when you have nothing will kill you, and trying to save yourself means you must lose yourself in the process.

To a Land Unknown is a heartbreaking drama that captures the hopelessness of refugees and migrants struggling to stay alive when they are nationless, as they try to escape to the place of their dreams. A place they can call home.

Flow (2024)

Director: Gints Zilbalodis

A beautiful animated film with no dialogue that depicts a possible world after climate catastrophe. After their home is devasted by a great flood, a courageous cat teams up with an unlikely group of animal friends in order to survive the disaster. The human world seems to have recently ended, with the vestiges of human presence teeming in the world the animals of Flow inhabit. Despite their differences these animals must work together in order to survive, perhaps in the ways that humans would have needed to in order to have averted this world we now see, but failed to do so.

What did the world look like before we were here? What will it look like after we are gone? To avert imminent calamity, we must care about the images we see when these questions are asked. As time moves forward our relationship to the physical world changes, everything constantly in flux, moving like water. It often feels these days that climate disaster is an inevitability, and what will happen to our world will be irrevocable. Flow shows us a future of floods that uproot everything in the blink of an eye, forcing every living thing to go on an immense journey only for things to return to normal just as quickly as they changed. Another flood or disastrous uprooting is unavoidable however, and not everyone has made it out unscathed. One thing has changed for the better though, you have made friends along the way. The conflict brought you together, and the next time the world changes you will not have to go through it alone. Despite all the grief, that simple fact can bring you solace, and for a brief moment your reflection in the water stands still amidst all the chaos of survival.

Memoir of a Snail (2024)

Director: Adam Elliot

“Life only makes sense backwards. But we have to live it forwards."

A stop motion animated film filled with sweetness, tragedy, sorrow, and humor. Grace is a young girl whose life is filled with misfortune, but she finds support in her loving twin brother Gilbert and her pet snails. After she is forcibly separated from her sibling following the death of her father, Grace struggles to overcome her feelings as an outcast and loneliness overtakes her. As years pass, she eventually strikes up a friendship with an eccentric older woman named Pinky, who has an optimistic outlook on life. Filled with equal heaps of bleakness and hope, Memoir of a Snail is a beautiful animated testament to friendship and the choice to overcome the tragedies of your life in order to keep on living. It is a film that shows us how all of us could learn to come out of our shell a bit more. Sometimes those who have the hardest lives can be the kindest, because they know how much the world can hurt you.

Bonus: Anora (2024)

Director: Sean Baker

While not an official part of CIFF, I had the opportunity to see Anora in beautiful 35mm this past week. Our title character, played by Mikey Madison, is a young sex worker from Brooklyn who gets the chance at a Cinderella story when she meets the son of a Russian oligarch. Once the news of this sudden marriage reaches the rich and powerful family, her fairytale is threatened as the family flies to New York to get the marriage annulled.

Anora (the film) is a fortuitous joyride full of chaotic moments that will make you laugh and quiet moments of empathy that will leave you teary eyed. Anora (the woman) is a layered and complicated character who you can’t help but love. The film follows the tragedy of her experiences being forced into transactional relationships with those richer than her, where despite all her brightness and enthusiasm she is left powerless. This provides her an empathetic lens to where you champion her and her fellow working class friends, hoping that they can one day unionize. Mikey Madison is truly a star and is undeniably the standout part of the film, bringing a gravity to the screen that keeps you in her orbit for the entire runtime. The performances and dialogue are absolutely magnetic and will leave your heart panging almost immediately after you just finished laughing. For Anora and her friends, you pray that she can overcome the odds stacked against her, even when the inevitable truth is that this situation is out of her hands. Anora is Uncut Gems if it could make you cry.

My Top 3 Film Recommendations From This Year’s CIFF:

1. Flow

2. The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Written about in Dispatch #2)

3. All We Imagine as Light (Written about in Dispatch #2)

That’s all for this dispatch and this year’s Chicago International Film Festival. After attending the festival for so many years and getting the opportunity to see so many films, it feels amazing to get the opportunity to actually write about the films I see. Thank you again for reading these dispatches, and thank you to CIFF for the opportunity to see these films. Happy 60th birthday, and here’s to 60 more!