LINCOLN PARK — Cybergrime, the latest short film series from programmer Henry Hanson, will bring eight shocking, provocative and at times surprisingly tender films to Chicago this weekend.
The films, screening Saturday at Facets Cinematheque, 1517 W. Fullerton Ave., are tied together by their obsessions with technology and “deviant” sexuality.
Cybergrime taps into a growing movement in the horror genre. There’s been an explosion of films steeped in the dissociative isolation of the internet over the past few years, and sleeper hits like “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” and “Skinamarink” are bringing mainstream attention to the niche online communities that inspired them.
Hanson’s goal with Cybergrime is to ground these aesthetics in the real world.
“I’m trying to demystify the internet,” he said. “The internet is made up of humans, and stuff that humans have made. I’m critical of the narrative of AI and machines as these metaphysical alien things that we can’t understand.”
Part of that is exposing the market forces shaping the internet: “It’s very much about the way that these technologies function within capitalism,” Hanson added.
These combine with the embrace of body horror by queer and trans filmmakers — “I think that a lot of trans people are super drawn to body horror,” Hanson said — and Hanson’s interest in outré material.
“I’m definitely interested in transgressive art, and I will sometimes use that word, but I am very critical of transgression as an end in and of itself,” he said. “I have my own moral and political and aesthetic compasses that I am looking towards. It’s just that those happen to be considered transgressive” by the mainstream.
The tone of the shorts vary, but none are for the faint of heart. After the nihilistic hand grenade of Kyle Mangione-Smith’s “Annihilator,” the program shifts into grainy black-and-white for “A.I. Mama,” a “post-cyberpunk Super 8 film” in which a lonely hacker attempts to reconnect with their long-lost mother via A.I. “1-888-5-BLUE-YOU” and “MonsterDykë” proudly plant their flag in the sand of monstrous perversion.
“Black Pill,” a local Chicago short Hanson produced, makes the tie between sex, commercialism and mutation explicit, in what Hanson called a “summary” of the themes of the show.
Hanson talked about Cybergrime as something akin to a collage or a zine: “I didn’t want any one film to be floating on its own without something that connected it to at least one other film,” he said.
Canadian filmmaker Louise Weard, whose film “Computer Hearts” divided audiences at last year’s Music Box of Horrors marathon, brings explicit gore with her short, “S.I.D.S.”
“I just like things that push the boundaries,” Hanson said. “It’s fun and interesting to me.”
He’s also strongly anti-censorship, and usually includes explicit sexuality in his programs as a nod to queer cinema history.
“Porn has always been a big part of queer cinema,” he said. “It’s often been the only way that queer lives could be openly presented on screen.”
Hanson’s goal is to increase public interest in short films, legitimizing them as an art form in the process. He also wants to get people interested in films by marginalized creators, bringing them increased funding — and, hopefully, the opportunity to make a living on their art.
Hanson loves short films because “you can take more risks. There’s a conventional screenwriting model for features, but there’s not really [the same rules] for short films. So they end up being more stylistically and narratively diverse,” he said.
Cybergrime is a collaborative event between Hanson’s Full Spectrum features and Facets. The two nonprofits share office space upstairs from the Facets. That’s where Hanson met Facets community engagement manager John McDevitt, who shares many of Hanson’s interests and recently launched a series at Facets “exploring queer, trans, and kink themes in the films of David Cronenberg.”
That type of camaraderie is what Hanson is trying to build for his audiences as well.
“When I first moved to Chicago, most of the people I knew here were in the music scene,” he said. “Being part of a music scene is inherently social … I don’t see why films can’t serve a similar function … There’s this feedback loop of our bodies and tech and capitalism and how we’re all creating these dark desires together.”
Cybergrime will screen twice at Facets at 7:30 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. Saturday (both shows will be presented with open captions.) Between shows, the newly renovated Facets bar will be open, with a lounge area done up in cyberpunk style.
Mangione-Smith will be on hand for a Q&A, and “A.I. Mama” star Keikii will perform a musical set in the lounge.
Tickets are $12 for general admission and $10 for Facets members. Masks will be required when not eating or drinking.
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