The Chicago Underground Film Festival, the longest running underground film fest in the U.S., is gearing up for its 16th edition that will run in the Windy City on Sept. 10-17. So far there are two festival trailers online. One, directed by Jesse McLean, is embedded above. The other, directed by Kent Lambert, is embedded below. Check ’em out.

McLean also has a short film, Somewhere Only We Know, screening at CUFF this year. I don’t think Lambert has one screening, although that would be the first time in the past couple of years. Hopefully I’ll have the full lineup on the Underground Film Journal within the next couple of days.

There’s also a lot more video that the festival has put up that you can check out on either their YouTube channel or their (extremely cool looking) Vimeo channel. They’ve posted up a bunch of trailers, film excerpts and more from this year’s screenings and from CUFFs past.

Also, the website Newcity Film has posted a great interview with Bryan Wendorf, CUFF’s co-founder and Artistic Director, conducted by film journalist Ray Pride. Most interesting is Wendorf’s take on what “underground” even means to CUFF these days:

In the nineties, we were still approaching things from a grungy, post-punk ‘transgressive’ aesthetic, and while I still love many of those films I rarely see examples of that type of filmmaking being done today that I have much enthusiasm for. The programming this year has more subtlety and nuance. Although CUFF is a relatively small festival in terms of the number of films screened, within those programs is a huge variety.