The November 21 program features a screening of “The Orbit of Minor Satellites,” followed by a Making-of Talk with director Chris SULLIVAN on the creative process behind the film.

Synopsis

The Orbit of Minor Satellites is a feature combining hand-drawn animation and live action. It follows psychiatrist and author Derwood Richards and his longtime patient Rosemary Hamm, whose case has shaped his career. In Rosemary’s hallucinations, another story unfolds aboard a 1960s Cold War US-Soviet space station orbiting a moon of Saturn, inhabited by a philosophical giant buffalo voiced by Boris Karloff using repurposed 1940s radio recordings. Moving between the psychiatrist’s office and Rosemary’s imagined world, the film explores love, loss, blame, forgiveness, and the unreachable selves we might have become.

PROFILE

Chris SULLIVAN

Chris Sullivan was raised in Pittsburgh with 10 siblings by a British mother and Irish-American father who met in England during WWII. Now based in Chicago, he teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His films have screened worldwide, including at Annecy, Zagreb and Ottawa. His feature Consuming Spirits opened theatrically in New York in 2012, and his latest film premiered in 2026.