The Z Film Festival is a microcinema media-showcase that was created by filmmaker Usama Alshaibi and launched on December 1, 2000 at the Heaven Gallery in Chicago. The following year, Kristie Alshaibi teamed up with Usama as director and programmer for the Z Film Festival. In 2001 the Z Film Festival began to solicit short movies internationally, and screened at the Gene Siskel Film Center in downtown Chicago. The festival had its final event in 2006.
Some of the filmmakers that were featured in the Z Film Festival: Miranda July, Richard Kern, James Fotopoulos, Tom Palazzolo, Mark Hejnar, Shawn Durr, Carey Burtt, Meg McCarville, John Goras, Piotr Tokarski, Steve Hall, and Cathee Wilkins.
The festival is known for playing controversial and sometimes shocking movies. From the website mission statement:
"Our commitment to true independent cinema holds strong. It is our primary mission to present the works of artists who have complete creative control over all aspects of the film or video making process. Often those works are unsettling, terrifying, beautiful, experimental, insightful, political, strange, perverse, or even just plain obscene."
Famous quotes containing the words film and/or festival:
“Television does not dominate or insist, as movies do. It is not sensational, but taken for granted. Insistence would destroy it, for its message is so dire that it relies on being the background drone that counters silence. For most of us, it is something turned on and off as we would the light. It is a service, not a luxury or a thing of choice.”
—David Thomson, U.S. film historian. America in the Dark: The Impact of Hollywood Films on American Culture, ch. 8, William Morrow (1977)
“Marry, I cannot show it in rhyme, I have tried; I can find no rhyme to “lady” but “baby”Man innocent rhyme; for “scorn,” “horn”Ma hard rhyme; for “school,” “fool”Ma babbling rhyme; very ominous endings. No, I was not born under a rhyming planet, nor I cannot woo in festival terms.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)