Vertical Cinema

10/29/2025

Venezuelan filmmaker Diego Andrés Murillo will be joining us November 15, 2025 for an exclusive screening of his unreleased feature film. The screening will be followed by an in-person Q&A with the director and producer.

Event Details:
As I Was Moving Backwards
Saturday, November 15th, 2025
4:00 PM – 6:00 PM (CST)
Adler Journalism Building E105
18+ Explicit Content
Always free and open to the public

About the Filmmaker:
Artist/self-taught filmmaker: director, writer, editor, producer. Diego was born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela and studied digital photography at The Roberto Mata School in Caracas. Co-founded EL FANTASMA, a Venezuelan film collective/studio. He migrated from his native country out of necessity in the year 2016 and unexpectedly stayed in NYC, his home for the past 9 years. To this date he has released five short films of different genres and styles. El Sonido Es El Cuerpo “Sound Is The Body”, an experimental feature he just finished, currently awaits release, as he develops Fiebre Karibe “Karibbean Fever”, another long-form film, while continuing to work on other parallel projects.
Diego’s projects usually entail speculative fictions that tackle topics such as individual/collective migration, apocalyptic imaginations, historical re-imagining, and repressed desires, emotions & malaises. These films have screened and won awards at international film festivals including Locarno, Brussels, Sitges, Cinélatino Toulouse, Tacoma Film Festival, Brooklyn Film Festival, Uruguay Film Festival, Chicago Latino FF, among others. He is a recipient of the Jerome Production Grant, the Venezuelan National Film Fund, and has participated in programs such as the Locarno Open Doors, Locarno Spring Academy, Tres Puertos Lab and the CineQuaNon Residency.

03/26/2025

Join us on April 18 at 5:30 pm for our new screening/Q&A!!
Location: Adler Journalism Building room E105

02/24/2025

Vertical Cinema Presents: Stand on Hands, Pacing in Light: a screening of short films from Kioto Aoki

Vertical Cinema is thrilled to invite you to our first event of the Spring 2025 semester. This Friday, February 28th, Kioto Aoki will join us for a screening of her works and Q&A.

Kioto Aoki (青木希音) is a Chicago-based artist, educator and musician, whose studio practice navigates various mechanisms and propositions of spatial and visual acuity that respond to, are formed by and creates observations or experiences of the body in space. The body activates, holds, and navigates propositions of sight and relativity as playful expressions of visual and formal imprints of historical presence. The artist’s body and the human form often becomes an inflection point that oscillates between assertions of personal, communal or universal experience and cultural histories. Primarily rooted in analogue image-making traditions of photography and cinema, Aoki integrates architectural, biographical and geographic histories that balance material and research-based approaches through nuances of material form, spatial play and exhibition strategies.

📅 Date: Friday, February 28
🕢 Time: 5:30 pm
📍 Venue: Adler Journalism Building E105

01/04/2025

10/08/2024

Vertical Cinema is thrilled to invite you to our first event of the Fall 2024 semester. This Friday, the University of Iowa alumni Kai Swanson will join us for a screening of her works and Q&A. Kai Swanson is an independent filmmaker and producer based in LA and NC. She has screened at several international film festivals, including the Buenos Aires International Film Festival, TIFF, Newport Beach Film Festival, and HollyShorts. Kai’s comedic series is streaming on Amazon Prime and the feature film she produced, East of Middle West, is on Apple TV and Amazon Prime.

📅 Date: Friday, October 11
🕢 Time: 5:30 pm
📍 Venue: Adler Journalism Building E105

04/10/2024

Here is more information about Nature Hater (2021) and a trailer for the film!

"Lost in her urban life and inspired by the early Christian hermits, a woman impulsively gets on a bus and travels from the city to the woods. Once there, she attempts to emulate the spiritual devotion and minimalist lifestyle of the desert ascetics. But her cultural obsessions -- pop music, stand-up comedy, clubbing -- begin to creep in and may derail her new discipline".

04/09/2024

Join us this Saturday, April 13 at 4:30 pm CT in BCSB 101 (Becker Communication Studies Building) for the screening of the film Nature Hater (2021) directed by David Sherman followed by a Q&A with the director and moderated by Cary Stough and a reception.
All Vertical Cinema events are open to graduates, undergraduates, faculty, and community members. We look forward to seeing you!

05/15/2023

May 6, 2023. Other Midwest Frequencies screening! Thank you all who joined us for this screening and Q&A!

05/15/2023

On October 8, 2022, Vertical Cinema co-founders Emily Drummer and Carl Elsaesser joined us for a joint screening and an in-person Q&A!
1. Featured image from Carl Elsaesser’s Home When You Return (2021)
2. Featured image from Emily Drummer’s Field Resistance (2019)

05/03/2023

Join us for our last Vertical Cinema Screening of the semester on Saturday, May 6th at 7pm in 105 AJB. We’ll be screening the work of grad students who will be in attendance for a Q&A following the screening.

All Vertical Cinema events are open to the public. We look forward to seeing you then!

03/17/2023

📢Join us next Friday, March 24th at 7:00pm at Public Space One for Lawrence Andrews’ mythicPotentialities (2021). A zoom Q&A with the award-winning artist will follow. In this hour-long imageless film, Andrews verbally deconstructs depictions of Emmett Till’s uncle that have appeared in landmark Civil Rights documentaries such as Eyes On The Prize. Throughout the piece, Andrews’ monologue is punctuated by dense and evocative soundscapes.

Pictured:
1) Lawrence Andrews 2) Interior of Tallahatchie County Courthouse 3) Public Space One Close House, Iowa City

12/04/2022

Thank you to all who came and watched "Hit the Road" with us!