contents:
letter from editor kesse alexander
interview with writer-director andré cecilio
bird artwork by audrey pauer
joke of the month by grady mcdonnell
Reader,
I became a Chicagoan thirteen months ago.
What immediately throttled my enthusiasm about the move was my own lack of self-assurance. Everybody in this town just seemed to get it. Prior to the change in scenery, I’d been going through a long, fraught period of arrested development in my parents’ house, which is located in a community so small that it’s actually technically a village. To relocate to the third-largest city in the country felt like starting over from nothing, and it was a little humiliating to feel so clueless at the humongous age of twenty-nine.
Chicago was an alien planet. It was an out-of-body experience to be thrust so suddenly, alone, into an environment totally different than where I was raised and where I spent the first leg of my adulthood. The city stretched so far beyond my reach, endlessly, like the colorless field of grass in Christina’s World; lived-in but liminal, familiar and lonely all at once.
But I was going to do my best to make it romantic. I’m sure you’ve gleaned from this conversation that romance is my favorite language. I literally write like fucking Bella from Twilight.
I spent what peanuts I made walking dogs that Spring on shit like expensive coffee and used books. I wanted my life in the city, this new independence, to be like a nouvelle vague, with my little Anna Karina bangs and bad attitude. It was all very based on not much more than an aesthetic of adulthood I was constantly trying and failing to cultivate.
It was frustrating that everything did not line up perfectly like a row of cherries on a slot machine. There was a primal urgency to my growing sense of cynicism that predated bookstores, coffee shops, and upscale thrifting.
It took a lot of consternation to realize that I would just have to be happy with being a new soul in a strange world. I was starting over, growing up, figuring out what I liked and disliked all over again. There’s romance in another childhood when you give yourself over to it, irreplicableby the pursuit of fleeting hits of dopamine.
As I turn my face to the sun in appreciation after the bitter cold of last season, it feels good to yield to my gentle second Spring.
With love, your big sister,
Kesse
WRITER-DIRECTOR ANDRÉ CECILIO IS GETTING AN IMAGINARY DIVORCE FROM HIS IMAGINARY WIFE.
…is a Chicago-based poet, writer, comedian, photographer, and director, whose latest work debuts in CineYouth’s “(Dis) Embodied” program on April 25.
He is also an instrumental piece in our plan for world domination.
We find seating in a walkway near the Art Institute of Chicago to begin Cecilio’s interview. A beautiful red-winged blackbird lands near us.
I feel like being watched by birds is the good version of being watched by cameras…I’m just really fascinated by this guy.
Interestingly, red-winged blackbirds are among the most aggressive and protective birds you can find in Chicago. In 2024,they made headlines for divebombing passersby in Millennium Park. We were in enemy territory, but nobody seemed to mind.
GRADY: I love crows, because they remember your face. If you fuck with them, they’ll tell their friends like “You gotta get this guy.”I like animals that hold grudges. Elephants do that.
I don’t think I have the aptitude to hold a grudge. I don’t think I can—like, I’ve tried.
GRADY: What do you mean you’ve tried to hold grudges? I can never really get past the point of feeling a little bit betrayed. Like, I can feel that bitter taste in my mouth after being wronged. But after a while, for some reason, I can’t really bring myself to keep fueling those flames, you know?
André Cecilio on holding grudges.
Cecilio initially planned on moving to the United States from Brazil to study film in cities like Los Angeles or New York, but fell in love with a local university’s programming and found himself landing in Chicago on Friday, August 20, 2021, at only eighteen years old. A move like this may seem daunting, but Cecilio had been moving all his life:
I bounced around a couple places in Brazil. I also went to Germany for two and a half years.
Cecilio and his sister had been enrolled in a German school in Brazil for roughly two years before then.
For some reason, instead of sending us to an international school with most classes in English, everyone in my family was like “No, we should all go to a German school. Like, a normal ass German school.” And I did!
GRADY: That’s awesome. No, no, it was a bad choice.
I could talk about the weather for ten seconds, and then I was sweating bullets. I could not do that much in terms of the language, but, I survived.
I speak German fluently nowadays, but it’s a bit rusty for sure. I can still understand it pretty well.
Saying he’s “rusty” is Cecilio selling himself short. He can hold fluent conversation in Portugeuse, English, German, French, and Italian. His bashfulness is a pervading force for the duration of our conversation.
Crazy detour, but I was watching Funny Games (1997) for the first time recently. That’s an Austrian movie, and I try not to look at the subtitles. I try to see if I still remember it—and it least in the Funny Games world, I can still remember the vocabulary they’re using.
So, if I’m in that situation, at least I’m getting what’s going on.
GRADY: At least you can watch Funny Games! I have no idea what it is.
MAX: Well, Grady, if you’re in a Funny Games situation, you’re gonna want to know some German.
That’s the kind of movie I wish I had watched completely blind. knew the intent, and that kind of took me out.
It’s a very sadistic movie.
For those unfamiliar, Funny Games is a hyper-violent thriller in which a family is held hostage by two men. It is designed to provoke film audiences’ propensity for observing and passively witnessing violence, with its antagonists frequently breaking the fourth wall to address the audience directly. When asked about the kinds of movies Cecilio would like to make, he said this:
I definitely want to make things that confront the audience much like that movie does. Very openly and also in its subtext, it relates to how we consume media. [In Funny Games] its through the lens of [onscreen] violence and our detachment from it. I don’t know if that topic is one that I have much interest in, but I do like to touch on the topic of perspective and subjectiveness.
Cecilio cites RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys (2024) as one of his favorite movies of all time. It is shot entirely from the first-person perspective of two young African-American boys in Jim Crow-era Florida. While the plot certainly compels him, Cecilio’s interest is first-and-foremost in the deconstructive nature of Ross’s camerawork.
It looks at things for you. It brings a very defined subjectivity to what its doing—the camera movements, placement, images, and timing…It’s the most important thing made in years. I will scream about that.
The way that we’re thought to consume [movies], we kind of forget that every single thing we see is subjective and [designed]. Even when it’s made to look as objective as possible…at all times [in Nickel Boys] you’re aware that [everything you see] is a very singular experience.
This focus on subjectivity driven by vivid, often combative imagery is a defining characteristic of Cecilio’s own work. Evocative and beautiful—sometimes haunting—recreations of memories or something once lived.
Untitled photos from André Cecilio, curated for SHOPLIFTED
Andre, not Andre (2024)
Magnolia (2024)
I’m thoughtful because I have a pretension to not act as fast as I should. So, I just sit around and think.
I don’t think I’m thoughtful in the way an active thinker is, like a philosopher. I think I’m more like a drifter. Maybe I should get get up and do something, but I kind of want to think right now.
MAX: I love that. It’s kind of nice, that very vagabond sort of feeling…Of course, in a more objective way, I do things. I’m working and I’m always trying my best.
Writer-director André Cecilio on a gig-based economy:
I’m not on a lot of formal film sets, like as an assistant on Chicago PD. Maybe I should be. Maybe I should try harder to do that, but I don’t. And that’s kind of it.
I’m just not going after it, ‘cause I kind of want to sit around and think about fuckin’ Nickel Boys.
MAX: I’m thinking about Nickel Boys tonight, I can’t make it. Right, I could get paid or I could think about Nickel Boys. Maybe one day you’ll be paid to think about Nickel Boys. Dude, I would love to get paid to think! The thing is, you also need to show the things you were thinking through work and organized structure. Sometimes I want to just think on my own.
MAX: Do you think there’s an art to [thinking]? I don’t know if I’m artful with it, but I’m sure there are a lot of people that are great at it.
GRADY: Well, sometimes you turn your thoughts into poetry.
MAX: Do you think in that language? I think more in English than I do in Portuguese and I hate myself for that.
Writer-director André Cecilio on the third space:
Nowadays you go to coffee shops and you have to work, because that’s your workplace, because you work from home, and you can’t work at home, because we’re depressed. So you go to a coffee shop.
The famous third space—you have home, you have work, whereas you need a third thing, where you can just hang around without needing to have a monetary gain or needing to make a purchase.
Cecilio gestures to the nature around us and fixes his eyes on another bird. He smiles. Parks are a great example of this.
André Cecilio on his approach to thinking.
André Cecilio on why he writes.
Writer-director André Cecilio on divorce:
I’m 100% sure that I’m going to get divorced. I feel pretty confident—If I had to put a parlay, I think I’m going to get divorced before my 40s.
Not that I’m actively trying to get a divorce. I just feel like I can relate to it. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the apartment of a recently divorced person, but it’s a sight. Like, it’s a vibe!
Writer-director André Cecilio on our rapid-fire questions:
MAX: Favorite food? Right now, probably butter chicken.
GRADY: What crime do you think you could get away with right now?Crazy, but I think I could kill a person and get away with it. Not because of a plan, but because of a stroke of luck.
MAX: Letterboxd top four? Nickel Boys, obviously. Punch Drunk Love (2002). Pathetic guy! Pathetic guy, but one that gets a lot of redemption! Oh, and Past Lives (2023), and Chungking Express (1994). I have a very specific vibe that I’m going for.
GRADY: How long could you survive in the wilderness alone? Lowkey, it’s either that’s the rest of my life and I make it for years, or I die in two hours.
GRADY: What’s your favorite vehicle for traveling? Big plane guy. Big plane guy. What about like, an electric scooter? I fall. I fall every time. I do not have the balance.
MAX: Favorite color? Red.
GRADY: Is there anything you want to ask us—is there anything you wanted us to ask you? What are you guys looking forward to, like, in life?
MAX: Working with you.
GRADY: Every project I’m working on, and working with everyone that’s working on those.
MAX: What about you? I feel like my inspiration and drive fluttered a little bit after leaving college, because that’s how it goes. But it feels like right now, I’m starting to get back into a groove that I recognize as my own.
I’m excited for spring. Excited to go out in less layers, kind of just get the fresh air and the sun.
Today’s a very nice day.
André Cecilio’s latest work, I Dream In The Color Of Your Eyes, premieres at Chicago’s CineYouth Film Festival on April 25, 2026. It will also stream digitally from April 27, 2026, to May 3, 2026.
joke of the month