Year Without a Summer 2026

Directed by Charles Cadkin

Eleven songs of Illinois, resurrecting ghosts across time and space. Each location borrowed from elsewhere. Among them Norway, Normandy, Lisbon, Ottawa, Peru, and Sandwich, forming the basis of a fragmented landscape study. The film traces the dissonance between ordinary Midwestern spaces and the histories embedded within their names. Fragments of local and global history, including ecological catastrophe, racial violence, failed harvests, murder, cultural displacement, and marginal history, emerge through voiceover created through artificial intelligence and synthetic image processes that destabilize the documentary image itself. Moving between essay film, landscape study, and horror cinema, the work examines naming as historical residue, a transfer of memory detached from geography yet still haunting it.