General public tickets sold out for the 6:00pm screening, with limited free tickets for SAIC students available. Encore screening added at 8:30pm!
Free tickets for students at the School of the Art Institute are available at the Film Center box office - student ID required, a limit of one ticket per student, and only available in-person at the box office. The Film Center box office opens 30 minutes prior to the first screening of the day.
“Fuses the heart of a poet with the mind of a scientist.”–Chris Stults, ArtForum
Award-winning filmmaker and School of the Art Institute of Chicago alum Deborah Stratman’s (BFA 1990) latest film is a profound exploration of the past and future of Earth through one of its most elemental materials—rocks. Meditating on our planet’s dramatic physical and biochemical evolution, Stratman weaves together sci-fi and sci-fact to imagine a time where life endures but humans have disappeared. Featuring a breathtaking array of sources, including J.-H. Rosny’s turn-of-the-century speculative fictions about rock-like organisms, interviews with renowned geologist and environmental activist Marcia Bjornerud, revelatory micro photography, and earthly observation, LAST THINGS asks us to ponder our place in this cosmic history and among the innumerable life forms our planet has produced. Stratman will be joined by her research collaborator, the writer Sukhdev Sandhu, to discuss the ideas and questions that informed the project.
Presented in partnership with the 33rd Onion City Experimental Film Festival as the official opening night screening. A project of Chicago Filmmakers, the festival runs from March 30 to April 2.
Deborah Stratman makes films and artworks that question power, control, and belief, considering how places, ideas, and society are intertwined. She regards sound as the ultimate multi-tool and time to be supernatural. Recent projects have addressed freedom, surveillance, broadcast, sinkholes, comets, raptors, orthoptera, levitation, exodus, evolution, sisterhood, and faith. Stratman’s work has been exhibited and awarded internationally for the past three decades. She lives in Chicago where she teaches at the University of Illinois.
Sukhdev Sandhu is the author of London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined A City (HarperCollins), I'll Get My Coat (Book Works), Night Haunts (Verso), and Other Musics (MoMA). His writings—on documentary and international film, experimental music, and migrant aesthetics—have appeared in journals such as Film Comment, Frieze, Artforum, Art in America, The Wire, 4Columns, The Guardian, and Süddeutsche Zeitung. He is an associate professor at New York University where he also directs the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture.