Chicago is adding another high-profile project to its 2026 production slate. The psychological techno-thriller Mia: See Clearly will shoot key sequences in the city next year, joining Detroit and New Orleans as principal locations.
The feature, produced by Golsa Sarabi’s Golsa Enterprises, begins pre-production in February. Sarabi stars as Mia, a brilliant but disillusioned former intelligence operative who stumbles into a sprawling surveillance conspiracy. As she races to expose a syndicate capable of manipulating perception itself, Mia becomes the target of an AI-generated doppelgänger: a perfect copy with all her knowledge, but none of her humanity.
The chase pushes her through three major American cities, Chicago, Detroit, and New Orleans, which will serve as a backdrop for several of the film’s most intense pursuit-and-paranoia-driven sequences.
Mia: See Clearly marks a return to the director’s chair for Beristain, the veteran cinematographer whose credits include Black Widow and The Beekeeper. Beristain co-wrote the film with Sarabi and is bringing his visual instincts, a blend of grounded spy craft and heightened futurism, to the project.
Though the film is set in a near-future shaped by AI and surveillance, Sarabi and her team say the inspiration reaches back more than forty years. “Mia’s struggle to reclaim her reflection mirrors the unspoken legacy of those who lived through the Iranian Revolution — the cost of seeing too much in a world that demanded blindness,” producers said.
This will be Beristain’s second collaboration with Golsa Enterprises after the short film The Persian Rug. “Mia: See Clearly pushes boundaries both visually and emotionally, and I’m excited to bring that vision to life,” he said.
With Chicago’s expanding footprint in genre filmmaking, from action to elevated horror to tech-driven thrillers, the city continues attracting projects that want both grit and skyline. This one brings both.
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