
The Pitch at Industry Days
presented by the 61st Chicago International Film Festival
Sunday, October 19, 2025 • 1:30 – 4:00pm
Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E Washington St | Map it >
The Pitch is free to attend and open to the public.
What Is The Pitch?
With the goal of spotlighting and supporting high quality work from Chicago and the Midwest, The Pitch at Industry Days invites filmmakers through the CIX: Lab program with narrative features in late stage development to apply for this opportunity to present their projects in front of a live audience and a panel of industry judges.
The winning project will receive an awards package of in-kind services, including consultation, production, and post-production.
Past award-winning projects have been invited to the Tribeca Film Institute All Access Fellowship, IFP New York’s 2016 Project Forum Film Slate No Borders program and Tribeca Film Institute’s TFI Network. Signature Move (The Pitch 2015 Honorable Mention) had its world premiere at SXSW and closed a distribution deal with Amazon Video Direct’s Film Festival Stars program. Other recent Pitch projects include Knives and Skin (2019 Berlinale premiere) and Once Upon a River (2019 Bentonville Film Festival premiere).
For questions about The Pitch, please email industry@


Pitch Host
Joyy Norris
Pitch Judges
Gabriel Mayers (Plot Twist Pictures) | Christina Oh (Celadon Pictures) | Luke Rodgers (producer)
CIX: Lab Advisors
Malik Bader | Melika Bass | Kyle Henry | Jennifer Reeder | Erica Weiss
Pitch Partners







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2025 Pitch Projects

Mosque4Mosque
Director: Sophiyaa Nayar
Writer: Abbas Salem
A repressed 33-year-old gay man rebels against his widowed Muslim mother and finally moves out, leaving his baby sister in the lurch when she needs him most: Senior year of high school.

A Phone Call to Wisconsin
Writer/Director: MC Plaschke
Producers: ME Monda, Hannah Kettering
When Jess, a hopeless romantic lesbian, finds out her crush Becca works at a Midwest LGBTQ crises hotline, she calls into the hotline pretending to be a teen in distress in order to get advice from Becca on how to date… well Becca.

Caterpillar Girls
Writer/Director: Wendy Roderweiss
About two best friends, Heidi and Alex, and set against the backdrop of Chicago’s late ‘80s underground music scene, Caterpillar Girls focuses on the beautiful and wretched hellscape of life as a 15-year-old girl, and on the bendy lines of truth and trust that come with deeply intimate friendships.

A Terrible Sound
Director: Shiloh Tumo Washington
Producer: Fabiola Auxil
In 1960s Chicago, an innovative jazz musician finds himself in love, en vogue, and with a new, piercing addiction.

Someday, Ohio
Director: Meghann Artes
Writer: Anna Hozian
Producer: Joe Lyons
Trying to keep five-year-old Champ out of Chicago’s foster care system after his mother’s death, 19-year-old babysitter, Angela, decides to take him on a trip of reconnection that goes utterly unexpected.
The Pitch Judges

Gabriel Mayers is a producer and firm believer in sharing local narratives with global audiences. She works with early career filmmakers and veterans to usher original and unique stories to production. Gabriel feels by producing narratives while keeping local audiences in mind, stories can be amplified to greater communities. She’s drawn to this work because she feels storytelling helps audiences build social empathy and develops the inroads toward societal change. She uses her financial knowledge and production and development experience to further the renaissance of the most original and diverse narratives in cinema. Her features, A Different Man and Mad Bills to Pay premiered in the 2024 and 2025 Sundance, Berlinale, New Directors/New Films, and the Karlovy Vary Film Festivals respectively. A Different Man won the 2024 Gotham Award for Best Feature and Sebastian Stan won the Berlinale Silver Bear and Golden Globe for his performance.

Christina Oh is an Academy Award-nominated producer who has worked on several film and television projects over her career, including Bong Joon Ho’s Okja (Netflix), Joe Talbot’s feature film debut The Last Black Man in San Francisco (A24), and Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch (Searchlight). She has also produced Minari (A24), written and directed by Lee Isaac Chung. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and went on to receive six Academy Award nominations, where Youn Yuh-jung won Korea’s first-ever Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. Oh’s past television credits include LEGO Masters (FOX) and Paper Girls (Amazon). In late 2023, she partnered with Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning Steven Yeun to head his production company, Celadon Pictures, where they will continuously look to champion and work with talented artists and visionaries across all fields.

Luke Rodgers is an Emmy- and Tony-winning producer working across film, television, and theater. He most recently worked as EVP, Creative at Los Angeles Media Fund, overseeing development, packaging, production, and strategy for LAMF’s slate of projects, including Elijah Bynum’s Magazine Dreams (Sundance 2023), Hannah Pearl Utt’s Cora Bora (SXSW 2023), Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Rob Peace (Sundance 2024), the Emmy-winning Legacy: The True Story of the LA Lakers on Hulu, Tony winners Stereophonic and Sunset Blvd., and Tony nominee John Proctor is the Villain. Previously, he worked at wiip, launching their film slate with Ana Lily Amirpour’s Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon (Venice 2021) and Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s Asphalt City (Cannes 2023). He began his career in the Media Finance Group at CAA, where as an agent he focused on packaging and arranging financing for independent director-driven films including Claire Denis’ High Life, Gaspar Noé’s Climax, Fisher Stevens’ Palmer, Heidi Ewing’s I Carry You with Me, and Joe Talbot’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco. He was named to Hollywood Reporter’s Next Gen 2023: 35 Under 35. A proud Detroiter, he graduated from Pepperdine University with degrees in Film Studies and International Studies.

























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