CIX: Lab Projects
The Chicago Industry Exchange (CIX), hosted by Cinema/Chicago and the Chicago International Film Festival, invites filmmakers with narrative fiction feature films to participate in CIX:Lab. CIX:Lab is a year-long creative development program, focused on script development, directing and visualization, and preproduction and pitching, finally culminating in The Pitch in fall 2022, where the filmmakers will pitch their projects in front of a live audience and a panel of industry judges and have private meetings with producers, financiers, and distributors.
The selected projects for 2021-2022 CIX: Lab are:

All Things Considered
Writer/Director: James Choi
Producer: Judi Krant
After an overdose sends Paul to the hospital, his spirited Korean-American Mother, So-Ri, is determined to reconnect with her son and help him with his depression through an exotic South Korean ritual that promises to deliver people from their despair.

Beards
Writer/Director: Hannah Welever
Queer best friends Gwen and Gordon moonlight as a straight
couple to survive a family reunion.

The Orchestra
Writer/Director: Curtis Matzke
Executive Producer: Nate Gilbert
A young college student finds herself terrorized by a group of undead musicians whose spirits are attached to an old instrument. Based on the short film of the same title.

The Predicament
Writer/Director: Andre Muir
Co-Writer: Jake Hutton
When a black man, Jamal, is arrested out of nowhere, he is forced to survive and navigate a surreal draconian prison system where neither the cause of his arrest nor the nature of the subsequent judicial proceedings are ever made clear to him, eventually propelling him down a rabbit hole of escalating paranoia, disillusionment and violence. Hilarity ensues.

A Real One
Writer/Director: McKenzie Chinn
Producer: Lisa Masseur
A bright teenager in a working class neighborhood on Chicago’s south side discovers the power and beauty of true friendship when her illicit relationship with a teacher is discovered amid the final weeks of her senior year in high school.