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 at Industry Days in fall 2026, 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 2025-2026 CIX: Lab are:
18th Street
Writer/Director: Grecia Aguilar
Producer: Judy Febles
Amid the grit and color of Chicago’s Pilsen, a withdrawn teen watches her two outgoing siblings split onto dangerous and hopeful paths—each choice shaping the family’s fragile future.
Damage Ctrl
Producer: Ashley Flowers
Writer/Producer: Farbota Lynn
Director: Julia Kots
A high-strung grad student and her deadbeat roommate join forces to seek revenge, and unwittingly become a vigilante duo plotting against sexual predators.
Etta LeRae
Writer/Director: Jana Naomi Smith
Producer: Adia Ivey
When a filmmaker’s curiosity becomes invasive, her obsession with a documentary subject who does not want to be bothered leads to compromised morals, jeopardized relationships, and revelations into her complicated past.
On the Water’s Edge
Writer/Director: Annette Elliot
Summer is coming to a close. A woman drifts like a ghost through the deserted streets, overgrown alleyways and windswept sand dunes of Gary, Indiana. She meets a reclusive gardener and a tenuous relationship unfolds.
Prodigal Sun
Writer/Director: Youssef Boucetta
Writer/Director: josh brainin
Writer/Producer: Camille Bacon
In early summer 2026, a young experimental band in Chicago gets an exciting record deal. As they struggle to focus, they decide to travel to Morocco to renew their inspiration and visit the lead singer’s terminally ill grandmother.
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