Block Cinema launches its 25th-anniversary season with Olivier Assayas’s IRMA VEP (1996), the film that opened its inaugural program in September 2001. Starring Maggie Cheung as a Hong Kong actor cast in a troubled Parisian remake of Louis Feuillade’s silent serial LES VAMPIRES, the film moves across a century of cinema while exploring creativity, cultural exchange, and reinvention. Its global perspective and expansive sense of film history make it a fitting beginning for Projecting the Future: Block Cinema at 25, a year-long celebration of the moving image.

The connection continues October 14 with a 16mm presentation of “Hypnotic Eyes,” the sixth episode of LES VAMPIRES (1916), accompanied live by Chicago musicians Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart. Projecting the Future: Block Cinema at 25 is a year-long series of screenings, performances, conversations, and special initiatives celebrating Block Cinema’s twenty-fifth anniversary and exploring the evolving possibilities of the moving image.