The Camille Cook Collection consists of outtakes, work prints, original negatives, collected films, home movies, and edited diary films of the experimental and personal work of Camille Cook, filmmaker and founder of The Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (now The Gene Siskel Film Center). The films depict various aspects of Cook’s life in Chicago throughout the mid 1960s, ranging from images of city street life to moments with her friends and family in Western Springs, IL, as well as her experiments in structural filmmaking.

The Charles E. Krosse Collection contains films produced and/or distributed by a Peoria film production company, C.L. Venard Productions, a company that became known for its educational films dealing with agricultural subject matter. It was donated to CFA by Charles E. Krosse, who previously worked in the Marketing division at Caterpillar. The collection contains both 16mm and 35mm films, a number of which may also be titles that Venard employees collected. Included in the collection are promotional and in-house training films made for Caterpillar, a fundraising film made for the city of Peoria, some soft-core erotic shorts, unrelated animated shorts, silent film comedies, and unidentified home movies.

The Glick-Berolzheimer Collection contains home movies by Diane Berolzheimer's father Jacob Glick from the mid 1930s through the early 1960s. It also includes home movies made by Diane and her husband Karl Berolzheimer from the mid 1950s through the mid 1970s. The home movies in this collection depict the leisure activities of the larger Glick/Berolzheimer family, rituals of Jewish life, and numerous fishing trips by Mr. Glick.

The Mayor Edward J. Kelly Collection consists of films collected by former Mayor of Chicago Edward J. Kelly (1933-1947) and found in his home in Eagle River, WI, after his death. Included within the films are fragments of newsreels depicting the construction of the State Street subway tunnel in 1939, the re-election of Kelly as mayor in 1939, the opening of a WWII service men's center in Chicago in 1942, and the unsuccessful presidential campaign of Thomas E. Dewey in 1944. The collection also includes a short campaign advertisement for Kelly's re-election in 1939.

The William Franklin Grisham Collection consists of release prints and outtakes of two major films Grisham directed in the 1970s; The Very Last Laugh which documented the history of Ebony Studios, and A Beautiful Lady, a documentary exploring the career of actress Beverly Bayne and the landmark Essanay Studios (both studios were based in Chicago). In addition, the collection includes 16mm prints of the all known existing works produced by Ebony Studios in the early 1900s (the original 35mm nitrate prints are believed to have disintegrated long ago). There are also numerous commercial films which Grisham either directed or provided copywriting for during his long career as an advertising executive - which ran parallel to his professional life as a film historian and documentarian. Alongside this, the collection consists of audio tapes capturing interviews with Luther J. Pollard, producer (and possibly the sole founder) of Ebony Studios, as well as Charles David who worked as his cameraman, and other notable figures who were instrumental in the shaping of Chicago's early film history. There are also several boxes of paper and ephemera relating Grisham's work on both of his documentary films, as well as the extensive history conducted on the history of Essanay Studios.