The New York Underground Film Festival may be calling it quits this year, but the other long-standing underground film stalwart, the Chicago Underground Film Festival, enters its 15th year, but not without some major news of its own.

Unlike NYUFF, which has had numerous folks at the helm, CUFF was co-founded by and continuously run by the one-and-only legendary Bryan Wendorff. That’s quite a monumental achievement. But with this year’s fest, while Bryan will continue to oversee the proceedings as Artistic Director, CUFF has been acquired by the IFP/Chicago.

CUFF will remain true to its artistic vision, even going as far to say in their mission statement (emphasis mine):

Our mission is to promote films and videos that dissent in form, technique, or content from the “indie” film/video mainstream

IFP/Chicago will take over CUFF’s financial responsibilities and will assume some management duties. And the one major change that will happen is that the fest will move from its traditional August screenings to probably early November, so that IFP can run it in conjunction with its own filmmaker summit that they’ve normally held in October.

CUFF is also currently open for entries, but I’ll put that up in another post.