“You'd have to be cranky or blind to deny Haynes' artistry and vision. There's a dark power, a tremor that runs through the movie like the rumble of a secret dread.” - Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune

“Moore, in a nearly unplayable role, is amazingly vivid and touching; this is a heartbreaking portrait of a woman in full, panicked retreat from life.” - Terrence Rafferty, New Yorker

May 2 at 6pm | The series’ earliest film—and way ahead of its time—SAFE dramatizes a situation many of us are now familiar with. Julianne Moore, in the role of her career as Los Angeles housewife Carol White, grows sicker and sicker. Perhaps she is allergic to her polluted environment, but her doctors can detect nothing amiss. She ultimately retreats to the cultlike Wrenwood, which locates the source (and blame) of illness in the spiritual plight of the ill themselves. A winner at Rotterdam and Seattle International Film Festivals among other awards, this film cannot be understood outside the context of the AIDS epidemic prior to the lifesaving drugs that would become available to a broader public in the very year the film was released. Its true topic is the radical alienation and isolation of the sick from the healthy during all pandemics, known and unknown.


Awards & Nominations

Nominee - Best Feature, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Female Lead (Julianne Moore), Film Independent Spirit Awards
Winner - FIPRESCI Prize - Special Mention, Rotterdam International Film Festival


Gore Capitalism Lecture SeriesProfessor Daniel R. Quiles presents Gore Capitalism, a lecture series centered on the everyday “horror” we are living through and how the individual gets caught in uneven wars between classes, races, genders, sexual orientations, healthy and sick, states and citizens. Presented in collaboration with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Art History, Theory and Criticism, and Film, Video, New Media, and Animation departments. View full series here


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