Michael Glover Smith

Michael Glover Smith is an independent filmmaker whose debut feature, Cool Apocalypse (2015), won awards at festivals across the U.S. and screened at Chicago's Gene Siskel Film Center and Movies in the Parks' Onscreen Local Film Showcase before being released on home video by Emphasis Entertainment. His second feature, Mercury in Retrograde, starring Roxane Mesquida and Najarra Townsend, won the top prizes at the 2018 Tallahassee Film Festival and the 2017 Full Bloom Film Festival and was the subject of a rave review by the Chicago Sun-Times' Richard Roeper who wrote: "Smith has a deft touch for dialogue, creating six distinct characters who look and sound like people we know...a smart, funny, quietly effective and authentic slice of older millennial life." His third feature, the anthology film Rendezvous in Chicago, premiered at the 2018 Adirondack Film Festival and won the Best Film Comedy award at the 2019 George Lindsey Film Festival. Relative, his fourth feature, was produced by Newcity/Chicago Film Project in 2022 and stars Wendy Robie and Francis Guinan as the parents of a family at a crossroads. It won Best Narrative Feature awards at the Buffalo International Film Festival and Full Bloom Film Festival and awards for acting at the Gasparilla International Film Festival, Festival of Cinema NYC and Midwest Film Festival. It also received the widest theatrical release of any of Smith's movies to date: despite its "micro budget," it was the 23rd highest grossing film in the United States during its first week of release.

Smith was a recipient of the Gene Siskel Film Center's Star Filmmaker award in 2017 and made Newcity Chicago's "Film 50" list in 2018 and 2020 for being one of 50 individual's who "shape Chicago's film scene." He co-authored (with Adam Selzer) the book Flickering Empire: How Chicago Invented the U.S. Film Industry, a chronicle of the silent-movie era in Chicago that was published to acclaim by Columbia University Press in 2015. He teaches film history and aesthetics at several Chicago-area colleges and is the founder and sole author of the film blog White City Cinema.