Chicago’s Jim Sikora, the city’s most influential underground filmmaker and pioneer of DV filmmaking, is coming back in person  to Albuquerque’s Guild Cinema on November 5 and 6 to show three of his most acclaimed films as part of a two-day retrospective that'll include of course talk/Q&A, entitled “Jim Sikora’s Chicago Neon Wilderness”!

We're talking “Walls in the City,” “Bullet on a Wire,” (along with special selected shorts!) plus, as a special late-night feature, a remastered 2K edition of “The Earl.” 

Thursday Nov. 5 at  7pm = WALLS IN THE CITY  (1994) features the late Chicago artist and actor Tony Fitzpatrick and Bill Cusack, brother of John and Joan, as well as The Jesus Lizard star David Yow in his first feature film appearance. Similar in nature to Robert Altman’s “Short Cuts,” the film shows three connected stories about Chicago’s underground tavern scene in the gritty early ‘90s.  BONUS!  Shorts and music videos from the period!

Friday Nov. 6 at 7pm  = BULLET ON A WIRE which stars Yow, is a taut drama about how a prank phone call turns deadly. Kevin Thomas, the dean of Los Angeles film critics, called it one of the best films of 1998.  BONUS!  Shorts, including “Urge Overkill’s” last music video from 2011!

Friday Nov. 6 at 9:15pm - THE EARL , newly restored in 2K, is a 2007 horror-comedy starring the late Danny Goldring about three brothers involved in a strange, bloody and hilarious private game with unclear rules of engagement. The Chicago Tribune described the movie as having a “pinch of ‘Fight Club’ and a dollop of Mamet,” plus a bit of Harold Pinter. The new 2K restoration recently played to a packed Chicago art house cinema in a double feature with the film “Eric LaRue,” directed by film star Michael Shannon.

**Sikora was at the Guild in the summer of 2025 to show his music-themed feature films “Rock & Roll Punk” and “My Charbroiled Burger with Brewer,” which featured punk legends Mike Watt of Minutemen, Greg Ginn of Black Flag and Greg Norton of Hüsker Dü.**