This will be the Film Society’s final season presenting films in the Auditorium at Northeastern Illinois University. After May 2025, NEIU will be renovating the Auditorium and its projection booth, which will preclude the continued permanent installation of our 35mm film projectors in the space. We are sad to see our residency at NEIU end, but we’re very proud of the programming we’ve done there over the past decade, and we are deeply grateful to the thousands of people who have made the trip to NEIU to see something adventurous and wonderful.
When we began our screenings at NEIU, the Film Society was still a very young organization. We’d only been around since 2011, and we struggled in our first few years to find a long term home for our shows. In 2015, a tip from a student led to a sponsorship from NEIU’s Communication, Media, and Theatre Department that made the Auditorium available to us on most Wednesday nights, along with space to install our film projection equipment. The CMT department gave us complete curatorial autonomy, which allowed us to make our programs rich and world class, studded with Chicago restoration premieres, introductions from visiting archivists and critics, and 35mm and 16mm film prints from a wide variety of archives, private collections, and Hollywood studio vaults. We also worked with the department to facilitate “NEIU Cinémathèque,” a course that gave NEIU students the opportunity to get college credit for watching movies like Pumping Iron II: The Women and making artistic 16mm animation loops. We can’t thank the NEIU Communication, Media, and Theatre Department enough for making all of this possible.
Don’t worry — we will continue to present regular screenings at the Music Box Theatre and elsewhere in the city. This will include the return of our popular Technicolor Weekend and Celluloid Now programs later in 2025. We are also already hard at work identifying new places to show movies.
Like a circus troupe schlepping heavy equipment and live animals around the countryside looking for an open field in which to erect the “big top,” we see occasional changes of venue as part of the natural course of show business (though it can be hard work). The loss of NEIU as a venue will leave a temporary gap in our programming, but the Film Society has at one time or another projected film at every venue in Chicago equipped to do so (and some that needed a little extra help), including the rooftop of a pizza restaurant, a parking lot next to the Metra tracks, and a mosquito-infested marsh. We’ve spent almost 14 years proving that with the right crew and a few well-oiled projectors, the audience will come.
But we’ll need your help! If you have any ideas for spaces we could use, we’d love to hear about it. If you have professional experience with commercial real estate, we’d welcome your advice. If you’ve been thinking about making a donation, we’ll need financial assistance to help us plan and move to a potential new venue.
We are excited to plan what comes next, and to continue showing movies to our amazing audience at other venues around the city. We’ll see you there!
View our current lineup.