There is a particular kind of magic that only exists in the flicker of a film projector, and this October, Chicago audiences have a rare chance to witness it firsthand. "THIS IS WHERE I WANT TO BE" arrives not with a marketing blitz or a red-carpet premiere, but with the quiet confidence of a handmade object - a two-minute silent short shot on 16mm Kodak T200, born from the Chicago Film Society's Intro to 16mm class. It is, by every account, a labor of love, and it may be the most genuinely independent piece of cinema you see all year.
Release Date & Where to Watch
Here is where things get refreshingly old-school: there is no streaming date, no digital rental window, no algorithmic recommendation waiting to serve this film to you. "THIS IS WHERE I WANT TO BE" exists as a single, original 16mm print, and what audiences will see is an unedited scan of that one and only print. That scarcity is the point. The film was made possible through the Chicago Film Society's Intro to 16mm class, which means its natural habitat is a screening room, a film society event, or a festival programmed by people who still believe in celluloid. Specific release details remain unannounced, so the best advice for interested viewers is to follow the Chicago Film Society's calendar and keep an eye on local repertory houses. If you are in Chicago, you are in the right city. If you are not, this is the kind of short that travels through festivals and micro-cinemas - the places where a two-minute film can be the whole evening's conversation.
Cast & Crew
The credits here are deliberately sparse, and that anonymity feels appropriate for a project rooted in place rather than personality. No director is listed. No cast is listed. The film is a silent short, which means no performances in the traditional sense - no dialogue, no star wattage, no names to hang a poster on. What we do know is that the film was created within the framework of the Chicago Film Society's Intro to 16mm class, an educational program that teaches students the physical craft of shooting on film: loading magazines, exposing negative, understanding grain and light. The crew, then, is a classroom - people learning a nearly lost discipline on actual stock, with actual stakes. The 16mm Kodak T200 black-and-white negative gives the project its visual signature: rich contrast, visible texture, and the unmistakable depth that digital capture still struggles to imitate. This is filmmaking as apprenticeship, and the absence of a famous name above the title is precisely what makes it interesting.
Story & What to Expect
Do not come to "THIS IS WHERE I WANT TO BE" looking for plot. At two minutes and silent, the film operates closer to a tone poem or a visual essay than a narrative. What it offers instead is geography: over 30 locations across the city of Chicago, captured on black-and-white 16mm and stitched into a brief, unedited scan of the original print. The result is a portrait of a city assembled from fragments - a corner, a bridge, a storefront, a stretch of shoreline - each frame carrying the specific weight of a place someone chose to point a camera at. The title itself reads like a declaration, and the film seems to take it literally: this is where I want to be, and here is what that looks like, one location at a time.
Because the presentation is an unedited scan of the sole print, expect imperfections. Expect dust, expect a splice or two, expect the organic wobble of a projector's gate. Those qualities are not flaws to be tolerated; they are the film's actual texture, the evidence of its handmade origin. Silent cinema asks something of an audience - attention, patience, a willingness to let images accumulate meaning without explanation. At two minutes, the ask is small, but the reward is a concentrated dose of seeing.
Why It's Worth Watching
We live in an era of infinite content, where films arrive by the thousands and disappear just as quickly. "THIS IS WHERE I WANT TO BE" is the opposite of that. It is one print. It is two minutes. It was made by students learning a craft on a format most of the industry abandoned decades ago. That combination makes it not just a short film but a small act of preservation - proof that the apparatus of analog cinema still functions, still teaches, and still produces images worth sitting in a dark room for.
There is also something quietly moving about the project's scale. Over 30 Chicago locations in 120 seconds suggests a filmmaker unwilling to waste a single frame, someone who understood that the class might be their only chance to shoot on 16mm and decided to see as much of their city as the stock allowed. The title stops being a caption and becomes a thesis. Where do you want to be? Apparently, here - on Kodak T200, in black and white, in Chicago, at 24 frames per second.
For anyone who cares about the survival of film as a medium, this is a must-see on principle. For everyone else, it is a reminder that cinema does not require a franchise, a budget, or a celebrity to matter. Sometimes it just requires a camera, a city, and two minutes of genuine devotion.
