Hekla

A film by Michael Glover Smith

Hekla, a determined Chicago actress, races through auditions, breakups, and self-doubt over the course of one chaotic day, risking her heart and career to claim her voice and step fully into the artist and woman she’s meant to be.

Michael Glover Smith is a Chicago-based filmmaker, author, and college professor. His most recent feature, the award-winning Relative, stars Wendy Robie (Twin Peaks) and is distributed by Music Box Films. His other work includes Mercury in Retrograde (2017), starring French film icon Roxane Mesquida, Rendezvous in Chicago (2018), and Cool Apocalypse (2015). His first book, Flickering Empire: How Chicago Invented the U.S. Fim Industry (Columbia University Press, 2015), co-written with Adam Selzer, is an acclaimed non-fiction study of film production in Chicago during the silent-movie era. His second book, Bob Dylan as Filmmaker: No Time to Think, was published by McNidder & Grace in 2026.

Director: Michael Glover Smith
Writers: Michael Glover Smith, Elizabeth Stam
Producers: Aaron Wertheimer, Elizabeth Stam, Michael Smith
Principal Cast: Elizabeth Stam, Mary Tilden, Sadieh Rifai, Brookelyn Hebert, Wendy Robie