A celebration of under-the-radar cinema kicks off on Thursday, June 24 when the Chicago Underground Film Festival returns to the Gene Siskel Film Center.

Now in its 17th year, CUFF showcases experimental, avant-garde, independent and underground cinema. Thanks to programmer and artistic director Bryan Wendorf, the fest is consistently packed with works that challenge conventions and appearances by cinema legends. This year is no exception.

More than 26 feature-length and short films encompassing all forms — narrative, documentary, animation, video art and more — roll out over the course of a week. Must-sees abound.

Festival opener The Wild Hunt is set within the world of live-action role playing — essentially medieval fantasy gaming played real-time in full regalia. The film constructs a fictional story around the game that allows everyday Joes to escape into epic lives of kings, knights, elves and other adventurous creatures. It’s enthralling viewing.

Americatown introduces a city (pop. 1,000) that is a skewed version of the United States, with hyper-patriotic citizens and oddly named monuments that look exactly like Mt. Rushmore, the Statue of Liberty, Millennium Park’s Bean and the Hollywood sign. When strange events set off calamity in this gigantic small town, a city administrator sets off to solve the problem, discovering that his town is bigger and more complex than imagined.

The film has a transfixing scope. The directors traveled the country using real landmarks as set pieces, giving Americatown a warped familiarity that recalls the use of contemporary Paris as sci-fi future in Godard’s Alphaville. The humor falls flat, unfortunately, but it’s so strange that it complements the overall weirdness.

World’s Largest also travels the U.S., but with a different agenda, visiting small towns that boast statues of the “world’s largest” something — apples, strawberries, frying pans, eggs, corn stalks, Paul Bunyans, jackrabbits, killer bees, snakes, lava lamps and more. Many of these rural burgs are poverty-stricken, and they innocently (and sometimes fool-heartedly) look to these giants to bring in tourist dollars and unite the community. The results can be humorous and saddening.

Scrappers should be essential viewing for all Chicagoans, as it reveals a side of the city often ignored by its residents.

The powerful doc follows two proud, but poor men who navigate beat-up trucks through Chicago’s alleys, mining trash for scrap metal to sell to recyclers. The money earned pays rent and buys food and clothes for their families.

The film charts the pair’s lives over several years — a period that begins in prosperity and ends in chaos when the value of metal falls to poverty-inducing levels. As the stories unfold, the stratified nature of race and class in Chicago is laid bare damningly.

The festival’s pieces de resistance are programs devoted to special guest Jonas Mekas, “the godfather of American avant-garde cinema.”

The documentary, Visionaries: Jonas Mekas and the (mostly) American Avant-Garde, and the shorts assemblage, Life is Unpredictable: Films by Jonas Mekas, are perfect intros to the seven-decades-long career of the former Village Voice writer/Anthology Film Archives founder/avant-garde film diarist and the birth of the American avant-garde film movement. Mekas’ rare appearances for post-screening discussions and to receive the festival’s lifetime achievement award transform these shows into once-in-a-lifetime events.