Cine-File continues to cover streaming and other online offerings during this time of covidity. We will list/highlight physical screenings at the top of the list for theaters and venues that have reopened, and list streaming/online screenings below. Cine-File takes no position on whether theaters should be reopening, nor on whether individuals should be attending in-person. Check the venues’ websites for information on safety protocols and other procedures put in place.
🔊 CINE-CAST: The Cine-File Podcast
New! Episode #14
Episode #14 of the Cine-Cast is all about the Chicago Latino Film Festival! To start, Associate Editor Ben Sachs speaks with contributors Megan Fariello and Marilyn Ferdinand about this year's line-up, with each participant recommending some of their favorite films on the slate, before reflecting on the festival as a whole. Then, Ben and fellow Associate Editor Kathleen Sachs interview CLFF founder and executive director Pepe Vargas about the history of the festival, the programmers' criteria for selecting films, and what viewers can learn from the festival about Latino culture.
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The introductory theme is by local film composer Ben Van Vlissingen. Find out more about his work here.
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Listen here!
📽️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS
Adam Wingard’s 2021 film GODZILLA VS. KONG (113 min, DCP Digital) continues. Also showing on Friday at 7pm are Toshiaki Toyoda’s 2019 Japanese short WOLF'S CALLING (17 min, DCP Digital) and his 2020 film THE DAY OF DESTRUCTION (57 min, DCP Digital).
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COVID policies for the Music Box here.
🎞️ CHICAGO LATINO FILM FESTIVAL
The Chicago Latino Film Festival continues through April 18, with online screenings and the Centerpiece and Closing Night films also showing as drive-in events. We review a generous selection of films below. Note that all are available for rent for the duration of the festival and that all are geo-blocked either to Illinois-only or to a block of Midwest states. Select features are accompanied by a short film. More info and full schedule here.
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Eduardo Margareto Atienza’s CUBA CREATES (Cuba/Spain)
Made to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the founding of Havana, CUBA CREATES looks at creativity in all its forms as the beating heart of Cuban society honoring the Indigenous, Spanish, and African heritages that are blended on the island. Guitarist and son practitioner Elíades Ochoa discusses the success of the Buena Vista Social Club, which he helped Wim Wenders realize as a film. Actor Jorge Perugorría uses part of his on-camera time to hype Cuba as an ideal place for international film and television production. Singer Danay Suárez recounts how she used the wide platform of a televised music contest to promote an anti-abortion message, thus disqualifying her from contention for changing the lyrics of her song. In a reverse of the usual story, Carlos Acosta was forced by his father to study ballet to prevent him from consorting with the break dancers in his neighborhood; Acosta became the first Black principal dancer of the Royal Ballet in London. The film abounds with visual artists, writers, and musicians whose works are presented to us like so many amuse-bouches—tasty, but leaving the viewer wanting more. What stood out to me was how urgently these Cuban artists, stamped by the psychological legacy of Fidel Castro, want to communicate with the outside world. (2020, 100 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Rodrigo Reyes’ 499 (Mexico)
The title of this Mexican art film refers to the 499th anniversary of Spain’s conquest of the Aztec empire; the drama reflects on the legacy of violence in Mexico, both historical and contemporary. Director Rodrigo Reyes employs a boldly fictional device to consider the weight of history, following a 16th-century conquistador who gets shipwrecked, magically, in the 21st century. Landing on the northern Mexican coast, the unnamed conquistador returns to the regions he once visited with Hernán Cortez and comments on how they no longer resemble the places he once knew. His narration also touches on the large-scale atrocities the Mexicans committed against the Aztecs; like Resnais’ NIGHT AND FOG and the numerous films it inspired, the film asks viewers whether they can see traces of historical atrocities in present-day landscapes. Reyes confronts present-day atrocities through documentary segments about men and women who have lost loved ones to pandemic violence in northern Mexico. Heightened by the historical meditation, these passages create the feeling that this area of the world will always be plagued by widespread murder. 499 is upsetting viewing to be sure, but it’s not always despairing; Reyes mines the scenario of the unstuck-in-time conquistador for subtle humor, and the widescreen cinematography is consistently good-looking. (2020, 88 min) [Ben Sachs]
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Nicole Costa’s THE JOURNEY OF MONALISA (Chile/Documentary)
After over a decade of falling out of touch with her friend Ivan, director Nicole Costa reaches out to them in New York from Santiago, Chile to try to reconnect with her performer/playwright friend. Having left Chile in 1995 to study at a playwriting program for a month, Ivan never returned. What we get in the process of these friends entering each other’s lives again is a vibrant celebration of queer outsider life and art. The film never pretends to be an impartial documentary; Costa constantly inserts herself into Ivan’s story. Quite often she’s the one pushing for them to do more and more. When we first meet Ivan, they're in the process of attempting not only to attain documented personhood in the U.S., but also have their gender affirmed legally. This process becomes the framework for the story of Ivan’s life. From their arrival in NYC and adopting the persona of Monalisa, a beautiful, no bullshit sex worker, to the publication of their first book, Ivan Monalisa’s life is presented here in an incredibly candid way. Mixing archival VHS footage of performances, excerpted text from Monalisa’s notebooks, recorded contemporaneous phone calls and messages between them and Costa, and documentary footage of their current life and performances, we are truly taken on THE JOURNEY OF MONALISA. Filmmakers, especially documentarians, so often glamorize and other sex workers, casting them in this world of decadence (a word which Monalisa rants against) that seems novel and intriguing to more square people. With Costa being a lifelong friend of Monalisa all that pretense is stripped away. We get to see someone talking about their life in the true margins of American society without any kind of editorialization or framework besides that of the subject themselves. It’s beautiful. The blend of archival footage with contemporaneous footage does so much to demystify Monalisa’s life. The fact that Monalisa used to carry a small camcorder with them everywhere is a boon to this film. We get footage of them hustling on the street, of them actually engaging in sex with a client (tastefully done so that anonymity is retained). We’re presented with a more honest version of the lives of sex workers than most films provide. The film culminates in an incredibly happy and cathartic ending that would be boringly trite if it were scripted. There is a scene in which Monalisa is asked to explain their identifying as two-spirit gender nonconforming and their reply is so uplifting in its simplicity and honesty. Right now there's a concerted political attack happening on the trans community in the U.S. and stories like Monalisa’s are the ammunition queer folks—especially trans and gender nonconforming ones—need right now. THE JOURNEY OF MONALISA is a positive, honest story about dedication and triumph—something, frankly, that everyone could use. (2019, 92 min) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
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Mario Ramos’ LA CONDESA (Honduras/US)
The press notes for this Honduran horror film highlight that it was shot inside one of the oldest haunted houses in Maryland. Though there are no actual ghosts in LA CONDESA (at least none that I was aware of), the mood is sufficiently creepy; first-time director Mario Ramos wrings as much commanding gothic imagery as he can from the location. Oscar Estrada’s screenplay is compelling too: jumping between the late 1970s and the present, the film develops a multigenerational mystery with shocking secrets at the core. Naturally, the filmmakers withhold those secrets to draw out suspense, so you may guess what they are before they’re revealed, but there’s more to LA CONDESA than just its plot. The film belongs to the substantial body of recent Latin and South American films about the sins of the past carrying on in the present; even when the suspense flags, the story still works on a metaphorical level. There are also some sharp observations on changes in sexual politics over the last few generations. It speaks to how high the bar has been raised in the horror genre over the last decade that even a basic programmer like this manages to address issues of historical responsibility and sexual politics. (2020, 82 min) [Ben Sachs]
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Leonardo Medel’s LA VERÓNICA (Chile)
Filmed entirely in medium close-up to resemble a selfie or video blog, LA VERÓNICA focuses on one character only: Verónica herself. She is always facing toward the camera while supporting players are relegated to standing behind it, in the background, or on the fringes of the frame; that is, with the exception of those—like Verónica’s teenaged niece—who are attracted to the online attention and also eager to be on camera. The film is primarily made of scenes from Verónica’s real life framed like her online video posts, rather than what she chooses to show to the world. In this way, LA VERÓNICA uses some striking camera set-ups to sharply comment on how internet culture is drastically shaping the unraveling Verónica, who will go to extreme and unsettling lengths to get attention. As a self-absorbed social media influencer, Verónica is sharing a very carefully-managed version of her life on the internet. She’s also a mother to a baby daughter and married to a famous soccer star, but neither of these things makes her happy, and she’s resentful that each can only take her so far in her social media career. Desperate to reach two million followers on Instagram in order to receive a lucrative brand deal, her ambitions are additionally impeded by her being a main suspect in a murder investigation. LA VERÓNICA is a cinematic character study at its most fundamental, and, as a biting critique of influencer culture, it succeeds especially due to the main performance. Mariana di Girolamo—star of Paolo Larraín’s 2019 film EMA—is fantastic, as she provides ominous complexity to this outwardly superficial character and effortlessly shifts facades depending on who is, or isn’t, watching Verónica. (2020, 100 min) [Megan Fariello]
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Cecilia Aldarondo’s LANDFALL (US/Documentary)
The September 2017 arrival of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico provides the obvious title reference and starting point for Cecilia Aldarondo’s documentary LANDFALL, but, as one of her subjects says, it was only the beginning of the suffering this U.S. territory would experience. Aldarondo roams the island for two years following the hurricane, revealing the outsized devastation wrought as a result of years of disinvestment partially caused by the demands of the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico (FOMBPR) appointed by then-President Barack Obama to pay down a $74 billion debt. As FOMBPR, derisively called La Junta by Puerto Ricans, exacted its pound of flesh on the devastated island, vulture capitalists from Silicon Valley swooped in to pick over the carcass. Aldarondo tours a high-end gated community on Puerto Rico’s northern coast where the developer caters to buyers looking for a place to protect their wealth from taxes. Quinn Eaker, a libertarian in the bitcoin business, and child star turned cryptocurrency capitalist Brock Pierce attend a conference where the naked greed of the all-white attendees is celebrated and young Puerto Ricans are induced to join the tech revolution as the new wage slaves of the island. Meanwhile, people in rural areas and a coastal community polluted and terrorized in the past by the U.S. Navy’s annual war games struggle to survive. Unwilling to endure any more malign neglect, Puerto Ricans from all over the island fill the streets of San Juan and force the governor, Ricardo A. Rosselló, to resign. The film ends with the momentary elation of the protesters, but there seems to be some truth to the bleak observation by one of the interviewees that, based on their response to the plight of the population, the government actually wants to annihilate the Puerto Rican people. The use of archival footage brings the sad history of the island into focus. Aldarondo’s direction effectively hones in on the points she is trying to make, but some of the allegorical imagery, such as a scene of pigeons waiting for a handout from an old man who drives to a parking lot each day to feed them, is clichéd and borderline offensive. (2020, 91 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Álvaro and Diego Sarmiento’s MOTHERS OF THE LAND (Peru/Documentary)
Short, heartfelt, and unexpectedly despairing, MOTHERS OF THE LAND succeeds foremost as a profile of people and places we rarely see in the movies. The principal subjects are female farmers in the Peruvian Andes who uphold agricultural traditions that have been in practice for hundreds (if not thousands) of years. Filmmaking brothers Álvaro and Diego Sarmiento provide insights into the women as well as their work, which seems time-consuming and arduous yet also honorable and pure. In interviews, the women speak movingly of their connection to the land—you realize their stewardship of their environment is conscientious because one naturally shows care and consideration when tending to someone she loves. The Sarmiento brothers don’t champion the subjects’ organic farming techniques as progressive, since they make clear that the techniques predate modern politics. At the same time, they include blunt conversations about the ruinous impact of climate change on mountain farming communities all over the world; these passages build a strong case for ending commercial farming practices and mounting a global return to more environmentally sustainable ones like those we see in the film. That return seems unlikely, given the state of the world, and MOTHERS OF THE LAND doesn’t try to rally any false hopes. Still, the filmmakers inspire such admiration for their subjects that they ameliorate the sadness of the film’s global outlook. As you might expect of a film shot in and around the Andes Mountains, the movie contains lots of breathtaking imagery as well. (2019, 74 min) [Ben Sachs]
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Mauricio Leiva-Cock’s THE NIGHT OF THE BEAST (Argentina)
“We shall go on to the end…We shall never surrender!” Scream for me, Cine-File! Finally, a feel-good heavy metal movie. I’m a sucker for period pieces set in the recent past. You’ve got to get rid of the contemporary ubiquity of smartphones—the easy solution to so many plot problems. Add some historicity to it, and you’ve got my full attention. NIGHT OF THE BEAST is the story of two teenage friends who are trying to get across town in order to see Iron Maiden’s first ever concert in Colombia. Based on this actual event in 2008, the film intersperses actual video footage and audio clips of the concert, and the surrounding insanity that played out just outside of the concert gates. At a very brisk 70 minutes (less time than a Maiden live album!) Leiva-Cock delivers a wonderful film about friendship, loyalty, and brotherhood. It’s refreshing to see a truly tender film about platonic male love and companionship, where sacrifice isn't made on some kind of macho battlefield but in love for the arts. While the plot of this film follows the groundwork laid down by such cult classic music films as Robert Zemeckis’ I WANNA HOLD YOUR HAND, Allan Arkush’s ROCK'N'ROLL HIGH SCHOOL, and Adam Rifkin’s DETROIT ROCK CITY, THE NIGHT OF THE BEAST manages to tone down the cartoonish camp of those films and injects a high dose of genuine heart. All the fat is trimmed from this movie, and it’s all the better for it. If you’re a fan of music, and by fan I mean fan as the shortened version of “fanatic,” and want to relive how important that one life-changing concert was, this will appeal to you. Iron Maiden fan or not, this is something that anyone with a love for that one band, singer, rapper, can relate to. But if you're into metal—and particularly Maiden—well, you absolutely can’t miss this one. Heartfelt hilarity wrapped up beautifully in a well-worn battle jacket. (2020, 70 min) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
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Alejandro Bellame Palacios’ OPPOSITE DIRECTION (Venezuela/Italy)
When the saying “opposites attract” was coined, it must have been meant for a couple like Eugenia Bianchi (Claudia Rojas) and Luis Tevez (Christian Josue Gonzalez). Eugenia, a conventional 17-year-old Venezuelan of Italian ancestry, can’t take her eyes off the gorgeous, brooding Luis when they meet at a party. She ditches her boyfriend, who has found someone else with whom to flirt, and takes off with him into the night to meet his artsy, outrageous friends. Soon, she and Luis set out on a road trip to find her Italian grandfather so that she can prove she is part-Italian and establish residency in Rome. This coming-of-age tale, based on the highly popular novel Blue Label by Venezuelan writer Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles, toggles between 2006 and 2019, as Eugenia returns to memories of her love affair/adventure with the volatile Luis, who has promised to meet her in Rome when she has reached age 30. The film captures the energy and passion of youth in the shadow of despair brought on by the hopeless economic and social milieu in Venezuela. It’s hard to understand what Luis sees in the ignorant, cynical Eugenia, and Rojas lacks the chops to make us believe in their connection. Still, the film manages to mesmerize. The cinematography by Alexandra Henao is exactly the sort of sun-kissed rainbow of beloved memories, and the colorful cast of characters are well realized by the acting ensemble. Erick Palacios and Edmary Fuentes as Luis’ friends Vadier and Titina are particular standouts. (2019, 123 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Manuel Ferrari’s OVERNIGHT (Argentina/Chile)
Charting the misadventures—romantic, professional, and otherwise—of a soft-spoken architecture professor and employing a naturalistic, long-take style, OVERNIGHT suggests a South American variation on a Hong Sang-soo comedy of manners. There’s nothing particularly cringeworthy here in the tradition of Hong’s early work, nor does this convey the wisdom of Hong’s more recent films; however, cowriter-director Manuel Ferrari strikes an agreeably laidback tone that encourages, like Hong’s, reflection on social mores and the nature of chance. The premise also evokes multiple Hong features (NIGHT AND DAY, ON THE BEACH AT NIGHT ALONE, etc.) in that travel plays a crucial role. At the start of OVERNIGHT, Ignacio, who teaches in Buenos Aires, accepts an invitation from two visiting students to deliver a lecture at their university in Valparaiso; while in Chile, he also plans to attend a job interview at a prominent architecture firm. He dives headlong into the trip despite the fact that he’s just learned his wife is pregnant—one sign among many that accepting responsibility is not Igancio’s forte. Ferrari develops a classical dramatic irony in the challenges he throws at his hero: over the course of Ignacio’s trip, he will have to assert responsibility over numerous things he generally took for granted. The decisions he has to make grow increasingly important as the film progresses, culminating with scenes in which Ignacio must decide on the future of his career, his nationhood, and his marriage. OVERNIGHT gains from Ferrari’s low-key approach, which accentuates the randomness of the twists of fate Ignacio encounters. You may leave the film wondering how unlikely were the decisive occurrences of your own life. (2019, 89 min) [Ben Sachs]
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Iuli Gerbase’s THE PINK CLOUD (Brazil)
In its opening text stating that it was conceived and filmed between 2017 and 2019, THE PINK CLOUD wants to make it clear it is not, at least originally, commentary about quarantine and the COVID-19 pandemic. This may seem like unnecessary information, but the unnerving prescience of this quiet sci-fi film cannot be overstated. Pink clouds of toxic gas have suddenly appeared across the globe; any human who comes in direct contact with it dies within ten seconds. Everyone is forced to remain inside with no idea what is causing these toxic clouds or when they might dissipate. After what would have likely been a one-night stand, Giovana (Renata de Lélis) and Yago (Eduardo Mendonça) find themselves trapped in a house together on the day the Cloud arrives. As time passes on without relief, these relative strangers are forced to share their lives, and are drastically changed by the result. The film is filled with uncomfortably familiar quarantine references: from the reliance on video chat and delivery services to conversations about how the change in weather will affect the Cloud and managing relationships and loneliness in the midst of an isolating global crisis. The weird timeliness of THE PINK CLOUD aside, it’s an excellent first feature from director Iuli Gerbase, shot beautifully with a pretty pastel tinge that contrasts the true terror of the pink clouds. The prophetic nature of the script reveals how carefully Gerbase thought out this scenario, and the outcome is a very realistic—and at times upsetting—depiction of what was once a very unfamiliar concept. It’s guaranteed that cinema will continue to grapple with this topic for years to come, but, without even the benefit of hindsight, THE PINK CLOUD is a wholly acute and affecting take on quarantine and the pandemic. (2021, 105 min) [Megan Fariello]
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Alejandra Marino’s SAND EYES (Argentina)
The chief interest of SAND EYES lies in how its narrative evolves. The film begins as a low-key character study, turns into a creepy mystery, and ends as a pulpy thriller. It never feels like the film is betraying its true nature or sacrificing its potential; rather, writer-director Alejandra Marino and cowriter Marcela Marcolini establish an air of enticing ambiguity that suggests anything can happen (also, each of the film’s segments is satisfying in its own way). This feeling doesn’t emerge until the movie’s second act, when Carla and Gustavo—a married couple who have been living apart since their young son was abducted a year ago—meet another couple whose eccentricities push SAND EYES away from realism and into a decidedly gothic realm. Before that, the film is a sensitive and observant consideration of grief, slowly introducing Carla and Gustavo so we have time to reflect on how their trauma continues to shape their lives. When they learn of another couple whose daughter may have been abducted by the same person or people who took their son, Carla and Gustavo jump at the opportunity to meet them—taking an interest in someone else’s tragedy may distract them from their own. The heroes travel to another town to meet the older couple, inadvertently going down a rabbit hole that leads to psychics, conspiracy, and murder. Marino maintains the same understated visual style throughout, emphasizing the nuanced characterizations and the wild developments of the script. (2020, 93 min) [Ben Sachs]
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Francisco Valdez’ SUN IN THE WATER (Dominican Republic)
Reminiscent of Gore Verbinski’s underrated A CURE FOR WELLNESS (2016), this atmospheric horror film from the Dominican Republic approaches the creepy hospital subgenre as a framework for bold, expressionistic imagery. It likely cost a fraction of what A CURE FOR WELLNESS did; in the great Val Lewton tradition, the filmmakers use the financial limitations to their advantage, drawing attention to the bare-bones cast and minimal number of sets to create a nightmare of isolation. Sol is a young woman who wakes up in a strange clinic with no memory of who she is or how she got there. The doctors and staff—all placid and withholding as medical professionals tend to be in horror movies—keep her doped up and evade her questions about when she’ll be able to leave. Sol becomes dogged in pursuit of answers, even as she drifts between dreams and reality; one of the most compelling parts of the film is that you’re never quite sure whether the heroine is awake. The filmmakers maintain a certain lucidity of narrative logic, so that it isn’t always immediately clear when the character has entered a dream state. The hospital, with its color-coded hallways and clothing, already feels like something out of a bad dream, while there’s something almost tangible about the dream sequences, particularly when they take place underwater. SUN IN THE WATER hinges on a familiar plot twist that some viewers may find disappointing. I didn’t mind it, given the abundance of imaginative visuals. (2019, 88 min) [Ben Sachs]
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Nicolás Rincón Gille’s VALLEY OF SOULS (Colombia/Belgium/Brazil/France)
The first narrative feature by Colombian documentarian Nicolás Rincón Gille is clearly influenced by the work of Argentine director Lisandro Alonso in its beautiful yet forbidding nature imagery, meditative long takes, and morbid tone. Yet where Alonso’s films achieve a certain metaphysical poetry in their considerations of death, VALLEY OF SOULS succeeds on more concrete, documentary terms. Rincón Gille dramatizes a painful episode of Colombia’s recent history that many viewers outside of South America might not know about. In the early 2000s, the Colombian government sanctioned paramilitary attacks on peasants and progressive organizations; these attacks employed methods that recall the Nazis in their sheer brutality. The hero of VALLEY OF SOULS finds himself in the middle of such atrocities, and his efforts to preserve his humanity account for the film’s dramatic force. José is a fisherman with three grown children living along Colombia’s Magdalena River in summer 2002. Upon returning from a fishing trip near the start of the film, José learns from his daughter that his two sons have disappeared. The fisherman, aware of the political situation, assumes at once that the young men are dead, then sets off on a mission to find their corpses and bury them properly. José’s mission is at once noble and reckless, and the film generates compelling tension from these conflicting emotions throughout his journey. One worries increasingly for José’s life the more one learns about the scope of the atrocities against the Colombian people. Appropriately, the film’s original title translates as “Too Many Souls.” (2019, 137 min) [Ben Sachs]
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Greta-Marie Becker’s THE WHISPER OF THE MARIMBA (Ecuador/Germany/Documentary)
In Esmereldas, on the border between Ecuador and Colombia where oil refineries and illegal drug trafficking form the official and unofficial industries, the impoverished descendants of Indigenous tribes and African slaves are working to recover their history and culture. At the heart of the effort is the marimba, an instrument and a sound considered threats to the ruling Spanish colonists. Benjamín Vanegas, a musician and marimba maker who is highlighted in Greta-Marie Becker’s anti-colonial documentary THE WHISPER OF THE MARIMBA, says, “In 1800, the Black community was forbidden to play marimba music, and again in 1930. The marimba, the bomba drum, the cununo drum came in the minds of the Africans brought to America and were the only form of resistance the enslaved Africans had.” The effort to pass on this culture might have had a boost when UNESCO declared marimba music an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2015. Sadly, the declaration provided nothing to Vanegas and the other practitioners of marimba Becker features—singer Rosa Wila Valencia and arts instructors Cristina Hurtado Quintero and Jorge González Hurtado—but bragging rights. This story is all too familiar and depressing, as we see that the inheritors of marimba are aging and learn that one of them—José “Nacho” Gabriel Caicedo—may be dying. The film was made before the pandemic, and it’s a worry that COVID-19 may have hastened the end of their struggle. Becker’s final scene of the townspeople in their small boats paddling out to sea to celebrate a religious rite as an enormous oil tanker looms in the background only adds to our sense of the fragility of their world and ours. (2020, 79 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Lissette Feliciano’s WOMEN IS LOSERS (US)
WOMEN IS LOSERS immediately sets up its sociopolitical stakes with an acerbic fourth wall-breaking opening scene. Taking its title from the Janis Joplin song of the same name, the film is set in late 1960s/early 70s San Francisco. Young mother Celina Guerrera (Lorenza Izzo) is acutely aware of the inequalities she and the women in her life are up against. After becoming pregnant and dropping out of high school, Celina is unwavering in her determination to get herself and her son out of poverty and out of her abusive childhood home. Characters continue breaking the fourth wall throughout, directly alerting the audience to the sexism and racism they are facing daily—Celina’s interludes are especially astute, highlighting both a very personal struggle and larger systemic issues. The plot, admirably tackling a lot, including abortion rights, the Vietnam War, and domestic abuse, sometimes feels unfocused and thus the film can never fully commit to its meta-narrative framing. It is, however, successful in balancing contrasting tones; despite its confronting of serious subjects, WOMEN IS LOSERS has an instant brightness to it, both in its colorful cinematography and gregarious performances. First time feature director Lissette Feliciano drew inspiration from her mother’s own experiences for the film, and the result, like its namesake, is a charismatic and empowering feminist anthem. (2020, 85 min) [Megan Fariello]
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – New Reviews
Sky Hopinka’s MAŁNI - TOWARDS THE OCEAN, TOWARDS THE SHORE (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
Feature-length movies by Indigenous filmmakers of North America are rare, but thanks to the efforts of the Sundance Institute, more stories of our native peoples are finding their way onto screens. Among them is Sky Hopinka’s MAŁNI - TOWARDS THE OCEAN, TOWARDS THE SHORE, the Ho-Chunk/Pechangan’s first full-length documentary. It centers on two Native Americans, Sweetwater Sahme and Jordan Mercier, living in Oregon. Sahme is expecting her first child and wondering about the experience of motherhood as she reflects on her own mother’s teachings and inability to keep her from life’s negative temptations. Mercier discusses why he decided to grow his hair long and how it makes him feel. Mercier speaks only in chinuk wawa, an Indigenous language of the Columbia River Basin of the Pacific Northwest in which Hopinka is fluent; Sahme speaks in English. Both are subtitled in either English or chinuk wawa. Woven through these two threads, Hopinka relates Indigenous myths about the life cycle as images of the lapping ocean, lush forests, and winding rivers pass before our eyes. Hopinka also records a large tribal gathering in a somewhat haphazard fashion. MAŁNI is awash in visual effects, many of which seem like Hopinka is just playing around to see what his camera can do. Where the film really excels is in its sound design. From the drumming and singing of the tribal gathering to electronic droning and rushing waterfalls, scorer Thad Kellstadt, sound recordist Drew Durepos, and music supervisor Jennie Armon create an immersive, hypnotic environment. Most touching for me was listening to Mercier, an expectant father, sing a song he hopes to pass on to his child as it was passed on to him. (2020, 90 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Oscar-Nominated Animated Short Films
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
Cute anthropomorphic animals, eccentric Scandinavians, heavy social messages, and arresting stylistic invention; Oscar’s wide-ranging taste in animation is well represented by this year’s nominees, which comprise both pet favorites and more esoteric marvels. Of the former category, it wouldn’t be the Academy Awards if Disney didn’t occupy its obligatory spot. Thankfully, Madeline Sharafian’s BURROW (6 min) is a delight, a warmly 2D-animated piece about a shy bunny trying to create her dream home. Reluctant to ask for help from the underground critters who keep digging through her walls, the bunny burrows deeper into the ground until she realizes she won’t be able to solve her problems alone. There are more complex thematic potentials here than Sharafian (and probably Disney) are willing to explore—urban development, housing inequality—but as a charming ode to community, the short is plenty satisfying. For those seeking ambitious, loaded concepts, Erick Oh’s mind-boggling OPERA (8 min) should do the trick. The antithesis of Disney, the short consists of one slow vertical pan down and then back up a giant pyramid structure, whose teeming contents reveal a vast, self-perpetuating ecosystem of exploitation and oppression. Despite the hierarchies of power he graphically delineates, Oh never guides your attention; rather, your eye is forced to wander endlessly across this perverse ant-farm serfdom and the plethora of cryptic dramas contained within. A more emotional approach to grim subject matter is found in Will McCormack and Michael Govier’s IF ANYTHING HAPPENS I LOVE YOU (12 min). Told in an elegant graphite-and-ink wash style, it depicts the paralyzing grief of two parents whose daughter is killed in a school shooting. In a film that goes the sentimental route, sometimes to a fault, its most potent gesture is simply a lingering shot of a large, vibrant American flag hanging in the school hallway; its stars and stripes should elicit only deep shame in anyone watching. From sobering reality to aesthetic phantasmagoria, Adrien Mérigeau’s GENIUS LOCI (16 min) charts the nocturnal odyssey of a young Black woman through a mystical, shapeshifting urban landscape. The look of it is breathtaking, whether it’s bringing to life the work of Belgian illustrator Brecht Evens, slipping into geometric abstraction reminiscent of Kandinsky and Klee, or even, at one point, detouring into a woodcut-esque montage. Rounding things out is Gísli Darri Halldórsson and Arnar Gunnarsson’s droll YES-PEOPLE (8 min), which chronicles a day in the lives of a handful of monosyllabic denizens of an apartment complex. It’s a deadpan Nordic symphony of minor annoyances, staged in little vignettes that suggest a more lighthearted Roy Andersson. Also playing in the program are three films that made the Oscar shortlist but were not nominated: THE SNAIL AND THE WHALE (26 min), TO GERARD (8 min), and KAPAEMAHU (7 min). [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
Oscar-Nominated Documentary Short Films
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here and the Music Box Theatre here
Like its Live Action counterpart, Oscar’s 2020 Documentary Shorts slate is dominated by weighty subjects, from systemic racism in the U.S. to major geopolitical crises abroad. On the more hopeful side of things is Ben Proudfoot and Kris Bowers’ A CONCERTO IS A CONVERSATION (13 min), which comes from the New York Times’ Op-Docs series. Following from the titular metaphor, the film is structured as a dialogue between Bowers, a successful black composer and musician, and his nonagenarian grandfather Horace. Through their intergenerational exchange, we learn about Horace’s migration from Jim Crow Florida to Los Angeles, where he still runs a neighborhood cleaners. His journey, scarred by institutional racism, is juxtaposed with the early-career success of his grandson, whose comparatively smooth vocational path highlights the degree to which racial equality has progressed over the generations. It’s a polished and poignant piece, inspiring without being mawkish. Another dialogue across generations takes place in Anthony Giacchino’s COLETTE (24 min). It centers on Colette Marin-Catherine, a former member of the French Resistance who is persuaded by a young historian, Lucie Fouble, to visit the German concentration camp where Colette’s brother was killed during the war. Their emotional, mutual excavation of memory reinforces the importance of the historical credo to “never forget.” Sophia Nahli Allison’s A LOVE SONG FOR LATASHA (19 min) is also about remembering, in this case the life of Latasha Harlins, a 15-year-old black girl who was shot and killed by the owner of a convenience store in 1991 South Central L.A. Her murder would partly catalyze the riots that erupted the following year, but Allison eschews footage of violence; instead, employing sensuous montage, animation, and simulated VHS static—as well as testimony from Latasha’s cousin Shinese and friend Tybie—she constructs an impressionistic archival tapestry that restores beauty and visibility to a life cut tragically short. The final two nominees address specific calamities unfolding in the present with on-the-ground immediacy. In Skye Fitzgerald’s HUNGER WARD (40 min), we follow a doctor and a nurse in war-torn Yemen who tend to fatally malnourished children at a pair of pediatric clinics. It’s a grueling watch, but one that’s productively angry in its exhaustion rather than resigned, fueled by the tenacity of the healthcare workers who refuse to accept as a norm the human rights abuses embattling their nation. Outrage also drives Anders Hammer’s DO NOT SPLIT (35 min), an immersive document of, and primer on, Hong Kong’s 2019-20 pro-democracy protests. Hammer puts us on the streets right alongside the activists, dodging rubber bullets and tear gas as the Chinese government escalates its siege against dissidents. The film has a powerful urgency, and a non-ending that underscores how still sadly necessary our global fight against authoritarianism remains. [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
Rohmer x 4
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre
Éric Rohmer’s A TALE OF SPRINGTIME (France)
Available to rent here
Despite his considerable gifts in the realm of visual composition, Éric Rohmer was ultimately interested in things that couldn’t be seen. His most popular film, MY NIGHT AT MAUD’S (1969), is about faith on the one hand and seduction on the other; the chief quality they share is that they’re both experiential. We can describe these things all we like—and Rohmer’s characters certainly do—but we can never touch either. A TALE OF SPRINGTIME, the first of Rohmer’s late career cycle “Tales of the Four Seasons,” is similar in its focus on the intangible—not for nothing is the main character a philosophy teacher. The opening sequence finds the 30-ish Jeanne (Anne Teyssèdre) leaving her boyfriend’s messy apartment, where she’s been staying while a visiting cousin uses her flat. Jeanne’s boyfriend has been out of town (indeed he never appears in the film), and his absence has Jeanne feeling impetuous. On a whim, she goes to a party one evening and meets a 17-year-old piano prodigy named Natacha (Florence Darel). The two become fast friends, with the teenage girl doing her best to draw the cool-tempered Jeanne into her life. Before A TALE OF SPRINGTIME enters into conversations of philosophy and the unknowability of others, it introduces the theme of trust, another intangible force. Natacha seems almost excessively, preternaturally attached to Jeanne, confiding in her new friend about her parents’ divorce from five years ago, her father’s love life since then, and her own current romance with a man roughly 20 years her senior. (The film addresses the problematic nature of this relationship, which, like Jeanne’s own romance, remains offscreen, though only once and in passing. Make of that what you will.) Does Natacha have ulterior motives in diving into this close friendship? She does hate her father’s current girlfriend and wants to replace her… Rohmer doesn’t characterize Natacha simply by her neuroses; rather, she’s a complicated individual who can go from being lovable to irritating and back again within the same scene. The great writer-director also manages nimble shifts in tone during the movie’s climax, an extended dialogue between Jeanne and Natacha’s father Igor (Hugues Quester) that represents, for at least part of its duration, one of the finest passages of Rohmer’s chaste eroticism. Critics like to invoke the old saying that Rohmer’s films are about privileged characters enjoying their privilege, yet it’s important to note that the privileges Rohmer considered are rarely material (although a beloved necklace is an important motif in A TALE OF SPRINGTIME). What Rohmer’s characters enjoy most is the privilege of free time, when they can think freely and abstractly, admire nature, or maybe fall in love. Spring is a good time to do all three, but it is above all a time of regeneration. Rohmer pursues that theme (another intangible) so subtly that it doesn’t become clear until the movie’s final scenes. That revelation is a classically unassuming surprise from a filmmaker capable of delivering at least one in every film. (1990, 107 min) [Ben Sachs]
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Éric Rohmer's A TALE OF WINTER (France)
Available to rent here
A TALE OF WINTER is the second film that Éric Rohmer made in his "Tales of the Four Seasons" series—the third and final of his major film cycles, after "Six Moral Tales" and "Comedies and Proverbs"—but, thematically and according to the narrative's placement within the calendar year, it feels like the true end point to the series. (For the record, the films can be enjoyed when seen in any order.) It is also a special movie in the director's canon, one that begins atypically with an extended wordless montage as two newly acquainted lovers, Félicie (Charlotte Véry) and Charles (Frédéric van den Driessche), cavort in a French seaside resort town while on vacation before they become separated by a simple twist of fate. Even more atypically, Rohmer then flashes forward five years into the future to focus on Félicie's day-to-day life as an unwed single mother living in Paris. She's now involved with two new men, the snooty academic Loic (Hervé Furic) and the more down-to-earth hairdresser Maxence (Michel Voletti), but she refuses to fully commit to either of them since she has never gotten over Charles, the man she considers to be her soulmate in spite of the fact that their time together was so brief. In many ways, A TALE OF WINTER feels like a more female-centric remix of Rohmer's beloved 1969 film MY NIGHT AT MAUD'S. Both are set during Christmastime and feature "Pascal's wager," the philosophical argument that it is logical to "bet" in favor of the existence of God, as a prominent plot point. But WINTER is also arguably a more mature and profound reworking of the earlier film's ideas: in contrast to Jean-Louis Trintignant's mathematician-protagonist in MAUD, Félicie has never even heard of Pascal—whose name is only invoked by Loic, a character portrayed as an annoying mansplainer—so that she works through her dilemma regarding faith on the level of emotional intuition rather than intellectual calculation (and thus allowing Rohmer to keep his philosophical themes more on the level of subtext). It is not giving anything away to say that the lovably stubborn Félicie is ultimately rewarded for her faith and that the film climaxes with the depiction of a miracle that is as moving as any scene Rohmer ever directed. As in A MAN ESCAPED, an otherwise very different kind of movie by another great French Catholic director, Robert Bresson, the outcome here seems preordained from the beginning, with Rohmer generating suspense not by making viewers wonder what will happen but rather how it will happen. The result is Rohmer's most purely romantic film, a balm for the heart as well as the mind. (1992, 114 min) [Michael Glover Smith]
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Also available through the Music Box are Rohmer’s 1996 film A TALE OF SUMMER (120 min) here and his 1998 film A TALE OF AUTUMN (120 min) here.
Emma Seligman’s SHIVA BABY (US)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here and the Gene Siskel Film Center here
In her feature directorial debut, 25-year-old filmmaker Emma Seligman sets a trap for her heroine in her single-space, comedy-horror SHIVA BABY. Following Danielle (Rachel Sennott), a college senior without a clear path forward, to the events at a funeral service for someone she doesn’t know, filled with family, friends, and the random people you only see every few years at events like these, Seligman’s film is composed of situations that make you, and Danielle, squirm. It pushes your mind into a specific time and place in your own childhood, high school and college years, and post-grad aimlessness. After missing the service itself, Danielle arrives at a home congested by people she’d rather not interact with: her ex-girlfriend, her sugar daddy with his wife and baby, and distant acquaintances that pester her about her future. The result becomes a showcase for Sennott and the rest of Seligman’s cast, including Molly Gordon, Polly Draper, Dianna Agron, and Fred Melamed—a mix of staples and newcomers in the darkly comedic space. Comparisons are sure to be made to the Coen brothers’ A SERIOUS MAN, in terms of a familial Jewish story where everything that can go wrong certainly will, and the more recent UNCUT GEMS, the Safdie brothers’ tense, hilarious thriller, but SHIVA BABY remains wholly original, leaning on its condensed runtime, confined setting, and willingness to let awkwardness turn into terror. Seligman’s first film announces her and Sennott as a duo to watch, capable of creating a singular viewing experience, one that both reminds you of terrible times and causes you to laugh hysterically at surreal line readings. SHIVA BABY taps into tension with a clever touch, turning what sounds like a well-worn general idea into something overtly specific. It’ll raise your heart rate yet put on a smile on your face, one that’s forced and then warmly genuine. Seligman is a star. Sennott is a star. SHIVA BABY is a film full of stars in the making and those that deserve a little more spotlight. (2020, 77 min) [Michael Frank]
Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s THIS IS NOT A BURIAL, IT’S A RESURRECTION (Lesotho/South Africa/Italy)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here and the Music Box Theatre here
The most exciting thing about THIS IS NOT A BURIAL, IT’S A RESURRECTION is its shape-shifting nature. BURIAL alternately resembles a realistic drama, an ethnographic documentary, a folktale, and an experimental film; each component defamiliarizes the others, since it always stands in sharp contrast to whatever cinematic modes surround it. (Even when director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese plainly cribs from Pedro Costa, Werner Herzog, or Andrei Tarkovsky, he renders his models strange by mixing them with so many unlike elements.) The myriad of forms, which comes to suggest a mural-sized mosaic, also has the effect of making the heroine seem larger than life. Introduced by a storyteller in quasi-mythic terms, the small-bodied but steely Mantoa seems monumental in her suffering: an elderly widow who’s also buried a daughter and a granddaughter, Mantoa learns at the start of the story that her son (the last living member of her immediate family) has died in a mining accident. The old woman decides that she has nothing left to live for and spends the rest of the movie preparing for death. Adding to the morbid vibe, the small village where Mantoa’s spent her entire life gets marked for demolition by the state; there’s a painful scene early on where a government representative explains to a congregation of villagers that their cemetery must be relocated before the area is flooded in order to build a dam. A vibrant spirit of community manages to shine through all of this, making BURIAL an exhilarating movie rather than a depressing one. It’s palpable, Mantoa’s connection to the people around her (both living and dead), ditto the bonds that her community members have with each other. Together, they will preserve their village’s traditions even if the village no longer exists physically. This theme of revitalization is mirrored in the film’s form, as Mosese fuses folkloric traditions with those of the avant-garde. (2019, 117 min) [Ben Sachs]
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Held Over/Still Screening/Return Engagements (Selected)
Kwok Cheung Tsang ’s BETTER DAYS (China/Hong Kong)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
Part crime drama and part romantic melodrama, BETTER DAYS is a powerfully dark coming of age story. Exacerbated by the tragic suicide of fellow bullied student, Hu Xiaodie (Zhang Yifan), Chen Nian (Zhou Dongyu) becomes the next target of harassment by her peers. Her excellent grades make her competition, and her impoverished background only exacerbates other students’ resentment of her; their bullying is violent and relentless. With the stress of college entrance exams on the horizon and her mother (Wu Yue) in serious financial trouble, Chen Nian is still compelled to find justice for Hu Xiaodie. In this broken system, however, the bullies responsible are let off easy. Chen Nian’s impulse to stand up to injustice is also demonstrated when she intervenes in the violent beating of a young local street thug, Xiao Bei (Jackson Yee). Their friendship blossoms into romance as he becomes her protector, but a murder investigation puts both their futures at risk. Director Kwok Cheung Tsang creates a consistently intense, claustrophobic vision, moving between closeups and wide shots to mirror the intense inner emotions of the characters and their precarious place in society—juxtaposed by colorful montages of the everyday life of more carefree students who are not struggling with the same dire pressures as Chen Nian or Xiao Bei. As the dynamic, unsteady camera moves through the cityscape it reflects how Chen Nian is constantly under surveillance, scrutinized for her grades and terrorized by classmates; Xiao Bei’s life is also dictated by the spaces he can navigate seen or unseen. Surveillance as a compelling visual theme is reflected in the prominent role smartphones play throughout, as well as in the subplot surrounding a young police officer (Yin Fang) investigating both the suicide and the subsequent murder. The main performances are quietly moving, particularly the exceptional Zhou Dongyu; Zhou Ye is also an impressive standout as Chen Nian’s vicious main bully, Wei Lai. BETTER DAYS meanders from its main focus at times but is impressive in its unswerving confrontation of dark themes while ultimately maintaining a sense of hope—mirrored beautifully in its final few moments. (2019, 135 min) [Megan Fariello]
Maya Da-Rin’s THE FEVER (Brazil/France/Germany)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
Forty-five-year-old Justino (Regis Myrupu), a member of the Tukano tribe from the northwestern part of the Amazon rainforest, has lived all of his adult life in Manaus, a city at the confluence of the Negro and Solimões rivers, where ocean-going vessels carrying containers are offloaded to waiting tractor-trailers to be driven to industrial centers around Brazil. Recently widowed, he works at the port as a security guard and raised two children who are adapted to modern, “white” life. Just as his daughter, Vanessa (Rosa Peixoto), is preparing to attend medical school in Brasília, Justino starts running a fever and has unsettling dreams about being pursued by white men with dogs and confronting himself in his work uniform in the forest. With quiet urgency, director Maya Da-Rin sounds the alarm about ecological catastrophes encroaching on Brazil and the contempt white Brazilians have for both Indigenous people and the natural landscape. Her film shows the behemoth machinery at work at the docks, but also the primordial rainforest that surrounds Manaus as a potent force in the lives of the Brazilian people. First-time actor Myrupu is a mesmerizing and sympathetic guide through this world. It is with poignancy that the film’s producer, Leonardo Mecchi, wrote about the burning rainforest and the fact that THE FEVER was the last film to be funded by the government before a far-right regime took power and ended arts funding. (2019, 98 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Molly Hewitt’s HOLY TRINITY (US)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
A movie about gaining the ability to speak to the dead after huffing Yoruba Orisha cleansing spray from a paper bag. Are you in or are you out? What if there also were casual hi-glam and drag elements? What if the film was the spiritual coming-of-age story of a queer femme dominatrix? What if someone made a film that somehow landed dead center in the Venn diagram intersection of John Waters’ and Bruce LaBruce’s films, the Ramones’ song lyrics, and Cindy Sherman’s and David LaChappelle’s photography? So… are you in or are you out? HOLY TRINITY is a film made exactly for the type of people who are going to love HOLY TRINITY. Director, and star, Molly Hewitt has created a world that is casually, yet still somehow aggressively, queer—nothing is particularly queer in the film’s world because everything is queer. It’s an amazing accomplishment. The casually absurd is just casual, the fringe is front and center. Yet, for a movie centered on huffing, Hewitt has made a lovely story about the spiritual dynamics of power and how it affects the film’s protagonist, Trinity. After looking for a quick high and huffing her roommate’s spiritual room cleansing spray (think a can of Lysol, but from the corner botanica) she discovers she can communicate with the dead. This new talent becomes both a gift (she now has an edge on her submissive clients) and a curse (she becomes internet famous to the detriment of her personal love life). With her new gift, Trinity has to learn to re-calibrate the power dynamics of her life, and the world around her. The entire movie is filled with these ideas. She has to re-question consent with her clients and the capitalist structure that surrounds that, her lifelong relationship with Catholicism, the personal relationship with her partner, Baby. It’s almost as if huffing just may have unintended consequences—ones both hilarious and serious. You’d think the story would get convoluted with all the concerted ridiculousness, but it doesn't. You can feel the sex-positivity, body-positivity, queer-positivity, radiating from this movie. HOLY TRINITY is absolutely shameless in the best way possible—in a literal way. No one feels any shame for what they do, or how they act, because there’s no need to—that’s just the way life is. Queer folks just living their outrageous lives, on their own fantastic terms. So… are you in, or are you out? (2019, 91 min) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
Ephraim Asili’s THE INHERITANCE (US)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
Based on writer and director Ephraim Asili’s own experiences, THE INHERITANCE combines a scripted narrative about a group of Black artists and activists starting a collective in a West Philadelphia home with a documentary-style exploration of Black political and artistic movements; the film focuses particularly on Philadelphia’s MOVE organization and the infamous 1985 police bombing of their row house. THE INHERITANCE is an impressive and exceptional amalgamation of cinematic forms with direct and profound audience engagement through musical performance, dance, and readings of theory and poetry; integrated, too, are segments of the collective’s workshops with real-life MOVE members and poets, including spoken word artist Ursula Rucker. With a subplot revolving around the creation of a house library, Asili emphases the significance of text within the collective, featuring numerous shots of book piles, photographs, vinyl records, and ever-changing quotes largely written in chalk on the walls. The cast at times reads directly to the audience from important 20th century works of the African diaspora, looking straight into camera, encouraging the audience to engage in the experience of exploration and education in the collective; this is particularly felt in a scene where poet Sonia Sanchez reads from her work, glancing up frequently into the camera, acknowledging the viewer as part of her audience. Asili uses bright, bold colors within the collective house itself which mirror shots of West Philadelphia and its vibrant outdoor spaces. Sound, too, is distinctive throughout: the whirring of the camera provides background noise, there are moments of persistent silence, and the recurring tuning of an obstinate radio. Asili also weaves in levity, with the scripted scenes of the collective members working through the everyday logistics of sharing space with others providing genuinely funny and sincere moments. THE INHERITANCE is a spectacular and unique first feature—a jubilant and commanding expression of Black culture, art, and politics. (2020, 100 min) [Megan Fariello]
Michael Glover Smith's MERCURY IN RETROGRADE (US)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
I previously praised Michael Glover Smith’s strong debut, COOL APOCALYPSE, for its subtle dissection of relationships in the inflexion point of their collapse. His sophomore feature, MERCURY IN RETROGRADE, builds upon and expands the earlier title’s strengths, presenting a nuanced and troubling portrait of six people who, over the course of a long weekend, quietly and privately reveal that they are in the process of exploding inside. It is a movie about three good-natured, loveable, charming men who each, in his own insidious way, is a manipulative, dehumanizing sexist, and the three spirited, jovial, smart women who have fallen for them. Built in two rough halves, the first part of MERCURY IN RETROGRADE shows us a deceptively idyllic group friendship, three couples who love one another, understand one another, and love being around one another. They eat, drink, joke, play, and seem to grow together as people. Everything feels wrong, but only with the second part in mind do the tension lines in the first become clear. An extended pair of alcohol-fueled conversations, one all-male at the cabin and the other all-female at a nearby bar, are intricately intercut and woven together, cutting away the pretense of kindness, decency, and equality that the characters have worked so hard to convince themselves of. Set almost exclusively in a palatial cabin in the Michigan woods, the movie’s roving compositions, highly mobile camerawork, and idiosyncratic editing keep placing characters in off-putting juxtapositions, dividing spaces, preventing the six principals from ever fully integrating with the natural world they’re surrounded by. Instead, following Smith’s title, they spin around and are trapped by one another like celestial bodies mere moments before collision. The phrase ‘mercury in retrograde’ itself comes from a term of pseudoscientific bullshittery that attempts to explain away misunderstandings and conflict by blaming it on the different orbital speeds of Mercury and Earth, and is a neatly symbolic way of signaling the viewer that the characters will both argue over important issues with one another and both misunderstand the nature of those arguments and be satisfied with papered-over illusions rather than actual resolution. Indeed, the narrative is awash in oddly revealing moments of internalized oppression and violence that are rationalized away as evidence of love: a throw-away comment one woman makes about convincing a partner to ‘let’ her have an abortion; another woman breaking out of a relationship of physical abuse only to pursue her abuser’s career path; a third whose desperate need to keep her history of violent exploitation, victimization, and addiction secret from her partner drives her to break years of sobriety. Many of the actors deserve special acclaim, especially Jack Newell and Alana Arenas, two local actors who play Jack and Golda, the one couple amongst the three to be married, inhabit their complex roles to a chilling degree. It’s one thing to play a dysfunctional couple, but another level entirely to play one that believes itself to be fully equal and loving. It is a trenchant, beautifully and disturbingly stylized look at misogyny and oppression, neither the first nor the last word on the subject by any means, but a modest and welcome addition to the conversation. (2017, 105 min) [Kian Bergstrom]
Oscar-Nominated Live Action Short Films
Available to rent through Music Box Theatre here and Gene Siskel Film Center here
If the films nominated for this year’s Best Live Action Short Film Oscar appeared together in any other context, one would believe they were curated specifically to cover as many of our present-day sociopolitical challenges as possible: immigration policy and homelessness, racist police violence, and the prison-industrial complex. That the Academy has managed to include films from both Israel and Palestine further reinforces a sense of an engineered optics, a reassurance that Oscar is leaving no stone unturned. None of the nominees exemplify this earnest appeal to the zeitgeist more than Travon Free and Martin Desmond Roe’s TWO DISTANT STRANGERS (30 min), a riff on GROUNDHOG DAY through the lens of Black Lives Matter. Here, the time loop conceit is used to convey the grinding recurrence of police brutality against people of color, as a young black man keeps reliving his day each time he is murdered by the same white officer. While initially effective in its bluntness, the short eventually groans under its heavy-handed and manipulative construction (there’s a cute pooch the guy needs to get back home to); a late-breaking twist, meanwhile, diminishes the systemic racism at play by making the cop character seem like a lone loony with a vendetta. I suspect others will be more receptive to the film’s mix of high-concept storytelling and social justice messaging. Other nominees are decidedly less didactic, locating their political concerns in intimate human drama. In Doug Roland’s FEELING THROUGH (18 min), a homeless teen develops a friendship with a deaf-blind man, helping him get home in the middle of the night. Roland’s patient, understated direction, sensitively attuned to the characters’ haptic mode of communication, grounds this moving tribute to everyday altruism. Similarly unfussy is Farah Nabulsi’s THE PRESENT (23 min), which portrays how a routine shopping trip in the West Bank turns into an arduous border-crossing ordeal for a Palestinian man and his daughter. The big ticket here, so to speak, is Elvira Lind’s THE LETTER ROOM (32 min), starring Oscar Isaac and Alia Shawkat. Isaac is a corrections officer at a penitentiary who is tasked with reading and monitoring the prisoners’ incoming missives. The film is evocatively shot, taking advantage of the strong overhead lighting in the prison hallways; the resulting sense of danger parallels the plot’s building intrigue, as Isaac’s officer is drawn deeper into the private lives of an inmate and his girlfriend. Tomer Shushan’s WHITE EYE (20 min), for my money the best of the nominees, closes out the program. A sort of modern-day BICYCLE THIEVES, this moral parable concerns a fraught encounter between an Israeli man, the Eritrean immigrant who supposedly stole his bike, and law enforcement. Unfolding entirely in a single take that navigates around a street corner and through a butcher shop, the film depicts how a seemingly just pursuit can have terrible and unforeseen consequences. Despite this, it’s never polemical or showy; its power lies in its anguished, unvarnished empathy. [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor’s ROSE PLAYS JULIE (Ireland/UK)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
People who have been adopted often feel as though their identity is somehow incomplete until they can connect with their birth parents. Sometimes knowing about one’s birth parents can fulfill fantasies or, at least, fill in some nagging blanks to achieve more peace of mind. But what if one is the child of rape? That is the shocking fact veterinary student Rose (Ann Skelly) learns when she finally tracks down her birth mother, Ellen (Orla Brady), an actress based in London who has tried to forget her trauma and the daughter she named Julie before giving her up for adoption. What happened to Ellen sets Rose on a quest to find her birth father, Peter (Aidan Gillen), and try to right his wrong. ROSE PLAYS JULIE is an atmospheric, slowly episodic film filled with pregnant silences and mournful music. The symbolism of Peter’s occupation as an archaeologist and the fact that Rose is learning about euthanizing animals overburden the film with a certain obviousness that shows up the cracks and conveniences in the plot. Nonetheless, the performances are magnificent. In particular, Skelly inhabits a quiet, emotional Rose who can play her cards close to her chest and act swiftly when necessary without losing her humanity. For those who like their revenge served cold, this film will hit quite a few right notes. (2019, 100 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Jennifer Reeder’s SIGNATURE MOVE (US)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
Jennifer Reeder’s debut feature is a charming rumination on modern relationships and identity. Zaynab (Fawzia Mirza) is a proud Pakistani, Muslim lesbian who takes up luchador-style wrestling when she’s not working at her day job, but she finds herself compartmentalizing the many facets of her identity when her recently widowed conservative mother moves in—and tries to search for a suitable husband for her only daughter. But when Zaynab falls for Alma (Sari Sanchez), her worlds collide in unexpected ways—and she realizes she can’t keep who she is away from the people she loves. As with the rest of Reeder’s work—including KNIVES AND SKIN and a wide array of intimate short films—SIGNATURE MOVE is most interested in peeling back the layers of how we communicate with one another and the relationships that mold us. The relationships you have with your partner, your family, and your own sense of self are all interwoven, even if you spend so much of your life trying to separate them or hide them from others. SIGNATURE MOVE uses the glitz and performance of wrestling to initiate thoughtful conversations on the masks we all wear, especially as queer people. It’s full of heart, introspection, and endearing humor—all while being wholly Chicago. (2017, 80 min) [Cody Corrall]
Chris McKim's WOJNAROWICZ: FUCK YOU FAGGOT FUCKER (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
This documentary about the late New York City artist David Wojnarowicz is incredibly impressive. Using an abundance of primary documentary sources from Wojnarowicz’s life, we get to have the late artist be a living voice in his own story from beyond the grave. The sources are an embarrassment of riches: 8mm home movies, audio diaries dating back to his early 20s, letters to and from family members, video interviews, journals, live footage of his no-wave band 3 Teens Kill 4, sketches, photographs, and even answering machine messages. For a film about a (mostly) visual artist, this is a heavenly bounty. Using all of these materials, WOJNAROWICZ charts the biography of the artist, who through his early street art and conceptual pieces (such as his photo series Rimbaud in New York) inadvertently made a name for himself in the New York art scene of the late 1970s and early 80s. What director Chris McKim does with the narrative form of the doc, however, is to curve the story—the politics of Wojnarowicz’s work and life, which become fully realized in both his art and anger after his diagnosis of AIDS in 1987, are given as much emphasis as the art itself. McKim shows the art making and attitude at the end of Wojnarowicz’s life were inevitable given everything that he lived before. The film opens with Wojnarowicz being filmed in December of 1989 while doing a phone interview about a group show about AIDS he was participating in that was losing funding due to the perception of it being too political. On the call you hear him very succinctly argue, “I don't have health insurance and I don't have economic access to adequate health care, isn't that political? To try to pretend that the subject of AIDS doesn't have a political tinge to it is ridiculous.” Three years later Wojnarowicz would be dead from the illness. Weaving us back to the beginning of his life, the film takes us through his history, from his childhood in an abusive home, to his street life and street art, to his first exposure in a legitimate gallery show, and to his later highly politically charged work and political activism of his post-AIDS diagnosis years. What makes WOJNAROWICZ a brilliant film, though, is that it is more than a film just about David Wojnarowicz. This is a film about queer art. About queer history. About queer anger. There is an overt indignation throughout the film at American society of the time. Something that is still echoed loudly right now. As is said in the film, this isn’t “gay as in I love you, [it’s] queer as in fuck off.” In the footage of Wojnarowicz at an ACT UP protest we see him wearing the now (in)famous jacket reading, “If I die of AIDS — forget burial — just drop my body on the steps of the FDA.” Produced by WOW Docs (the documentary arm of RuPaul’s production company) and directed by the former showrunner of RuPaul’s Drag Race, this is a movie made with an obvious love and passion for queer culture, for one’s own culture. I can’t even imagine what this film would have been like if it only focused on Wojnarowicz’s art in and of itself. We don’t ever need another hollow story about art, with a patina of queer politics, focusing on the New York art world ever again. I so wish it was possible to destroy those films before they're even made. This is a documentary on the level of THE NOMI SONG, a doc that has the distinct possibility to bring its subject back into the limelight of the (queer) community from which he left far too soon. It could quite possibly even take David Wojnarowicz’s name out of the art world, and academy, and back into the streets—where he belongs. I hope it does. Wojnarowicz’s art, writings, politics, and especially his voice—of which there is so very much of in this film—are just as relevant now as they were 30 and 40 years ago. When he sang “we are all essential laborers / you will die soon enough” in 1982, we can feel that now. When he said “There’s absolutely no way you can separate politics from AIDS” in 1989, we can feel that now. This film is David Wojnarowicz as a mouthpiece for an epidemic that killed tens of thousands of Americans before the President addressed it in a major policy address. This is David Wojnarowicz as the specter of all the art we know we lost, and all the art we’ll never possibly know we lost, because of AIDS. This is David Wojnarowicz not as a metaphor, but as an example. WOJNAROWICZ shows the artist’s life and work as the angry, queer mirror reflecting back the American culture that is truly diseased. This film has the capacity to truly affect people. Queer folks have forever been under attack in our society and we’re always in need of heroes of action, we need to hear the stories about the people like us that used every bit of themselves to fight against this perpetual pressure. If not an angry queer role model, WOJNAROWICZ gives us an angry queer role hero—and we could use one now as much as ever. (2021, 105 min) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Also Screening/Streaming
Chicago Film Archives/Hideout
The Chicago Film Archives and Hideout co-present Amateur Hour, an online screening of amateur and student films from CFA’s collection, on Wednesday at 8pm. Tickets and more info here.
Museum of Contemporary Photography
MOCP presents an online screening of Kate Kirtz and Nell Lundy’s 1996 documentary JANE: AN ABORTION SERVICE (58 min) and Barbara Attie, Janet Goldwater, and Mike Attie’s 2019 documentary short ABORTION HELPLINE, THIS IS LISA (13 min) on Friday at 7pm. The films will be available for a week. More info and tickets here.
Conversations at the Edge
CATE presents Wong Ping: Digital Fables, a program of six short works (2014-18, approx.. 63 min) by the Hong Kong filmmaker from Monday through April 18. More info here. Wong Ping also participates in a lecture/conversation on Thursday at 7pm. Info and link here.
Asian Pop-Up Cinema
Asian Pop-Up Cinema presents a mix of online and drive-in screenings of more than 30 films for their Spring season. The online programming continues through April 30 and the drive-in screenings take place April 15-May 1. More information and a complete schedule here.
Video Data Bank
VDB presents Stephen Varble’s 1982 experimental video work LADY HERCULES, A PRELUDE TO ‘JOURNEY TO THE SUN’ (41 min) here.
Facets Cinémathèque
Midi Z’s 2019 Taiwanese/Malaysian/Burmese film NINA WU (113 min) and Zach Lamplugh’s 2019 mockumentary 15 THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT BIGFOOT (83 min) both are available for streaming beginning this week. Check the Facets website for hold-over titles.
Gene Siskel Film Center
Kaouther Ben Hania’s 2020 Tunisian film THE MAN WHO SOLD HIS SKIN (104 min) is available for streaming beginning this week. Check the Siskel website for hold-over titles.
Current and upcoming offerings in the Film Center’s new online lecture series, Talking Pictures, include critic and author Jonathan Rosenbaum (Tuesdays, continuing through April 13), journalist and curator Sergio Mims (Mondays in April and May), and filmmaker/professor Jennifer Reeder (Tuesdays, April 13-27). Details here.
Music Box Theatre
Kaouther Ben Hania’s 2020 Tunisian film THE MAN WHO SOLD HIS SKIN (104 min) is available for streaming beginning this week. Check the Music Box website for hold-over titles.
🎞️ ADDITIONAL ONLINE SCREENINGS
Prismatic Ground - Wave 1: Desire Is Already a Memory (Festival)
Available for free through April 18 here
“For centuries, people have been depositing their ideals, their identities, dreams, and rights into these modernist containers…” That line comes from the first few minutes of A MACHINE TO LIVE IN (2020, 88 min), the dazzling essay feature by Meredith Zielke and Yoni Goldstein that anchors this first “wave” of the new Prismatic Ground film festival. The “modernist containers” they’re describing are buildings, which naturally figure prominently in a film about Brasilia, the planned city designed by visionary architect Oscar Niemayer which has served as the capital of Brazil since 1960. But Prismatic Ground also advances a vision of cinema as another such repository for desire, identity, and agency. A MACHINE TO LIVE IN takes a quizzical, digressive approach to its subject, fitting for a city whose arch-utopian Modernist origins are often belied by a mysterious, messy, and often downright weird reality today. But A MACHINE TO LIVE IN is no bitter elegy for the lost horizon of the mid-century Shangri-La; rather, Zielke and Goldstein go out of their way to find pockets of enduring aspiration, like the community of Esperanto speakers at a school in the Brazilian Highlands north of the capital. Perhaps that’s why this acutely digital documentary sits nicely beside a mini-suite of recent works from Bill Morrison, the knight of neglected nitrate—Morrison, too, is a master of recovering pearls of desire from the clutches of decay. That’s explicitly the case with SUNKEN FILMS (2021, 11 min), which examines histories behind reels rescued from the ocean depths. Morrison’s aim isn’t to celebrate nitrate film for its own sake, but to return us to the traces of history and the sparks of life that linger in these scraps. That’s the peculiar nature of “modernist containers” like films and time capsules—frozen records of the past, they nonetheless testify to a faith in their deferred recovery in an unforeseeable future. A couple of the films in Wave 1 make for excellent time capsules of our peculiar moment, particularly Alison Nguyen’s MY FAVORITE SOFTWARE IS BEING HERE (2020, 20 min), which contemplates social media, AI, virtual space, and the enervating experience of quarantine house arrest, as various “machines to live in” today. With “Andra8,” a virtual assistant whose precarious existence demands she constantly consume and share data, Nguyen concocts what may be the definitive avatar of millennial affect. Modeled on Nguyen herself, but composited from machine-learning algorithms trained on social media posts, Andra8’s broken speech and spastic movements convey the distress of distraction, but also remind us of the ghost in the machine’s unruly potential. Devon Narine-Singh’s NOTES OF A WIND CHIME (2021, 24 min), another COVID-19 time capsule, similarly upholds the unruly in both form and content. Even the most fastidious archival films are media diaries at heart, and Narine-Singh—a programmer at Film-Makers Coop as well as a filmmaker—seems driven by a need to transform the images he’s consuming (including Fiona Apple performances, clips from Wong Kar-Wai and Michael Snow films, and footage from ACT UP’s radical activism during the AIDS crisis) into instruments for intimate connection in the midst of a plague. The video isn’t so much an essay as a container for these disparate yet urgent images, into which identities, dreams, and rights are deposited with messy affection. NOTES OF A WIND CHIME shares themes of mediated memory and utopian yearning with the works described above, while its emphasis on forms of queer desire and collective expression resonate with several other shorts in this generous collection. Another work by a Co-op luminary, M.M. Serra’s ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES: JACK WATERS AND PETER CRAMER (2021, 16 min), lovingly profiles a long-running collaborative multimedia practice, but also captures a sense of the longevity of the Lower East Side creative and gay communities. Raed Rafei’s QUEER UTOPIA: FROM STONEWALL TO TELL GARDEN (2021, 8 min) juxtaposes jubilant demonstrations of queerness in a New York Pride parade with more muted manifestations in a public park in Tripoli, Lebanon—where queerness is expressed, as Rafei has put it elsewhere, “in a small gesture, a furtive look, an ambivalent smile.” Perhaps the most thrilling demonstrations of public queerness can be found in Amber Bemak and Angelo Madsen Minax’s TWO SONS AND A RIVER OF BLOOD (2021, 11 min; only available until April 11), which features an unforgettable multi-camera “public sex ritual” atop the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan, Mexico. Minax’s ongoing project—one of the most exciting in contemporary experimental film—advances a defiantly trans ontology; if the work feels transgressive, it’s not just because his images are sometimes explicit. Rather, it’s because he approaches fundamental questions of subjectivity, intimacy, geniture, and cosmic creation from a place of insistent vulnerability, which his work dares us to embrace: as a voice whispers on the soundtrack, “the hole in me sees the hole in you.” If A MACHINE TO LIVE IN points to the folly of utopian edifices, TWO SONS AND A RIVER OF BLOOD proposes a radical alternative of utopian orifices. Like the rest of the films in “Desire Is Already a Memory,” it suggests that, despite everything, the future is open. [Michael Metzger]
CINE-LIST: April 9 - April 15, 2021
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Kian Bergstrom, Cody Corrall, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Michael Frank, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Raphael Jose Martinez, Michael Metzger, Michael Glover Smith