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 #15
For Episode #15 of the Cine-Cast, some members of the C-F gang (Associate Editors Ben and Kathleen Sachs, contributors John Dickson and Megan Fariello) have a long talk with New York-based critic Scout Tafoya, author of a new critical study of horror director Tobe Hooper (THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, POLTERGEIST, LIFEFORCE). The conversation touches on nearly every phase of Hooper's storied career, with a focus on the artistry that directors can smuggle into disreputable cinematic material. But before the group talks Hooper, we round up some notable recent arthouse releases (Sky Hopinka's MAŁNI, Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese's THIS IS NOT A BURIAL, IT'S A RESURRECTION) and delve into the current blockbuster GODZILLA VS. KONG. The introductory theme is by local film composer Ben Van Vlissingen. Find out more about his work here.
---
Listen to the Cine-Cast here!
📽️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS
Viktor Kossakovsky’s GUNDA (Norwegian/US Documentary)
Music Box Theatre - Check Venue website for showtimes
There have been plenty of attempts in media to sound the alarm on factory farms and the animal industry—Jonathan Safran Foer’s bestseller turned Natalie Portman-produced documentary EATING ANIMALS, the pseudo-propaganda films like COWSPIRACY and FOOD, INC. that consistently circulate in vegan and vegetarian spaces online, etc. But while some of these have convinced viewers to cut down on meat or on animal products as well, the antagonistic approach of these films often fails to resonate with most people. Viktor Kossakovsky’s GUNDA takes a wholly different approach: instead of filming the graphic abuse animals may face in factory farms to solicit a reaction, he follows them through their routines and lets them take up space. In his first film since the crucial and visually arresting documentary AQUARELA, Kossakovsky focuses instead on the animals at a Norwegian farmstead. There are a lot of things fascinating about GUNDA—it’s entirely wordless, there’s no score, it’s shot in stark black and white, and there isn’t even a single human shown on screen. Kossakovsky removes all distractions and refuses to rely on cheap pulls of pathos—after all, it’s the farm animals who are the stars here. GUNDA is not a cry for sympathy, at least not completely. At its core, it’s a celebration of some incredible creatures: a mother pig (the titular Gunda) and her fresh litter, a one-legged chicken with a penchant for drama, a bonded pair of cows. GUNDA is quiet yet undeniably engrossing, and manages to translate the inner workings of animals in a deeply human way. (2020, 93 min, DCP Digital) [Cody Corrall]
---
Also available virtually here.
---
COVID policies for the Music Box here.
The Music Box and Creepy Co. present Half-O-Ween 2021: Horror Weekend at the Drive-In on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at Chi-Town Movies Drive-In (2343 S. Throop St.). Screening are: HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH (Friday, 11pm), MIDSOMMAR and ALUCARDA double feature (Saturday, 8:15pm), and FRIDAY THE 13TH PART III and SLEEPAWAY CAMP double feature (Sunday, 8:15pm). More info here.
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – New Reviews
Roy Andersson’s ABOUT ENDLESSNESS (Sweden)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
Swedish writer-director Roy Andersson trades almost exclusively in tableau-like shots that suggest the offscreen space goes on forever—in this regard, all of his features beginning with SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR (2000) could be called ABOUT ENDLESSNESS. Andersson’s style is by now immediately recognizable; as Nick Pinkerton summed it up in a November 2020 article for Sight & Sound: “It comprises a string of vignettes, almost all playing out in a single take, viewed by a locked-down camera with a static frame that holds its human subjects in the philosophical distance of a deep-focus long shot… The skies in his Stockholm are overcast or pale; the light in the city is weak and milky; and the walls are bare in the city’s seedy cafés and offices and flats. Grays and off-whites proliferate, and the palette is desaturated, as though colors have lost their will to live in this cold climate.” For those who appreciate his aesthetic or his dry, Scandinavian wit, Andersson’s approach is endlessly compelling. Each shot feels like a little world unto itself (too bad Chicagoans can’t see this on a big screen); the director strews details all around the frames, creates expansive backgrounds, and brings each scene to a pointed observation reminiscent of a fable or parable. ABOUT ENDLESSNESS (for which Andersson won the Best Director prize at the Venice Film Festival) feels especially parable-like in its focus on big philosophical questions. The movie runs just 76 minutes but has the air of an epic, since Andersson seldom strays from considerations of what it means to live, love, believe, act morally, kill, grieve, and die. Most of the scenes are narrated by an omniscient figure who flatly delivers pithy descriptions of the onscreen action (e.g., “I once saw a man who wanted to surprise his wife with a nice dinner…”), which renders them, alternately, universal and almost comically simple. Indeed, the straight-ahead, presentational style is a reliable source of deadpan humor; even the recurring character of the preacher who’s lost his faith comes across as a little funny when seen from such an exaggerated distance. Andersson’s style can be devastating too, as in the scene of a man who instantly regrets carrying out an honor killing; and it can be majestic, as in a scene occurring roughly halfway into ABOUT ENDLESSNESS that finds three young women improvising a dance in front of an outdoor cafe in late afternoon. A director prone to using miniatures to create the illusion of outsize spaces, Andersson is very good at reminding us how small—which is to say, precious—humanity is in light of eternity. (2019, 76 min) [Ben Sachs]
Dieudo Hamadi’s DOWNSTREAM TO KINSHASA (Democratic Republic of the Congo/Documentary
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
In 2000, a six-day war occurred between Ugandan and Rwandan forces in Kisangani, a city in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; approximately 1,000 people died, and 3,000 more were injured. Five years later the International Court of Justice compelled the former country to pay reparations in the sum of ten billion dollars, one billion of which was to be allocated to people wounded in the conflict but has yet to be paid out. In his viscerally evocative documentary, Congolese filmmaker Dieudo Hamadi accompanies a cadre of now-disabled survivors as, almost 20 years after the fact, they make their way to Kinshasa to demand what's owed to them. Apart from opening title cards that explain the circumstances of the Six-Day War and a sequence where some of the town’s residents take Hamadi to a mass grave (and explain directly to the camera the atrocities that occurred there), the filmmaker avoids didacticism by immersing viewers in the subjects’ stories in a manner at once intimate and encompassing. Hamadi initiates these tactics subtly, showing a few of those wounded as they go about their day-to-day lives in Kisangani; in particular he focuses on a young woman, Sola, who lost both her legs and needs prosthetics (which are generally in disrepair) to walk. The journey to Kinshasa via the Congo River is introduced by way of meetings held by a de facto committee of victims deciding who should represent the group in the capital city. Their perilous voyage, shot on Hamadi’s iPhone, composes the middle part of the film. It’s direct cinema to the extreme, as the camera moves among the passengers of a cramped boat whose roof is made of plastic tarps and other such materials. It’s no pleasure cruise, with passengers crammed together like sardines, eating bad food and contending with the elements. Some of the most harrowing scenes involve intense rain and wind storms that compromise the boat’s slipshod covering. The group takes it in stride, however, as their challenges on the boat are relatively minute compared to the ones they face in life—consider a conversation between a man and woman in the group as they discuss being told by their families to commit suicide, so as to relieve the burden on them. The faction makes it to Kinshasa, where more strife awaits; upcoming elections, which were eventually postponed, become an excuse for lawmakers to ignore them. But the group forges on, employing protest tactics to make their stories heard. Throughout Hamadi includes footage of performances by members of the group as cohorts of the Troupe les zombies de Kisangi, a collective comprised of victims of the Six-Day War. In the rehearsal space, a woman without arms or legs called Mama Kinshade (a truly inspirational spirit) gives a rousing speech, encouraging the others to have courage to perform before a new audience. They break into song and dance, the release brought on by such creative activities almost palpable, especially as one participant writhes on the floor without shame. Hamadi himself experienced the Six-Day War when he was just 15 years old; he spent an arduous 24 hours hiding in a church with his siblings until they could get home. His commitment to the stories of his people is reflected in his filmmaking, the camera urgent and unwavering. The film also has the distinction of being the first from the DRC to be an official selection at Cannes. (2021, 89 min) [Kathleen 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]
Jeffrey Wolf’s BILL TRAYLOR: CHASING GHOSTS (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here and the Music Box Theatre here
This short documentary about American folk artist Bill Traylor (1853-1949) manages to say quite a bit about Traylor’s paintings and drawings, connecting them to other modes of Black creative expression from across the 19th and 20th centuries. It also succeeds as a colorful biography and a vivid history lesson. Born into slavery in Alabama, Traylor grew up with his extended biological family intact because the white plantation owners they worked for felt almost familial affection for their slaves. (The film, while no apologia for slavery, recognizes the range of relationships that existed between Blacks and whites in the American South during the slave era; some of the most fascinating interview segments feature Black historians unpacking this complicated history.) Traylor’s family remained on that plantation as sharecroppers for decades after the Civil War, during which time the young Traylor loved many women and sired many children. Some art historians see references to Traylor’s carousing in some of his paintings, which he didn’t start creating until he was in his 80s; they also infer from numerous Traylor portraits of arguing couples that his domestic life was likely tempestuous. The chief achievement of BILL TRAYLOR: CHASING GHOSTS may be that it interweaves art criticism, history, biography, and sociology so gracefully that these topics come to seem as one. Case in point: when the film covers Traylor’s move to Montgomery, Alabama, in the 1920s, the filmmakers note how his migration coincided with many other Black people leaving southern farms for urban areas, often in the north. Even though Traylor only started producing art later in life, his output was vast and he earned the esteem of at least one dedicated patron. His creative output, rough-hewn and frequently jubilant, gets plenty of screen time, and the longer you look it, the richer it seems. One sees in his forms reflections of the great upheavals of his long life and of the personal sorrows and joys that came along the way. (2020, 75 min) [Ben Sachs]
Cinéma Direct Action: 1960s Student Activism in Francophone Documentary
Available for free viewing through Sunday through Block Cinema (Northwestern University) here
Michel Brault and Pierre Perrault’s ACADIA ACADIA?!? (Canada/Documentary)
If they know about Acadians at all, many Americans think of them as the French Canadians who settled in the New Orleans area and became Cajuns. Beyond that, Acadians and Acadia seem almost mythological in Canada, even to the Acadian college students of the French-only University of Moncton (UM) whose protest for the rights of the French-speaking inhabitants of New Brunswick are captured in this informative documentary by Michel Brault and Pierre Perrault. Acadians, we are told, are unusually passive and have been unwilling to speak out against the official bias toward English and British-based government and culture in the Maritime provinces where Acadians first established themselves in the early 17th century. The international student protests that peaked in 1968 seem to have awakened the Acadian and Québécois students of UM who go to petition Moncton’s mayor, Leonard Jones, to enact bilingualism in the city. His rude dismissal of them only fans the flames, as they deliver a pig’s head to his home, boycott classes, and eventually take over the science building with the aim of getting more funding for their university. The film shows the obvious disparity in funding for the English-only University of New Brunswick as compared with UM and highlights the loyalist contingent in the province that pledges its fidelity to the British crown and wants the rest of the country to follow suit. But it also takes us inside the personal lives and struggles of several students who personalize what being a second-class citizen in a British colony feels like. In particular, Irène Doiron is a cause for worry as she openly talks about suicide as the revolt devolves and her close-knit group of friends and comrades start to give up and move on. The fight for equality looks about the same everywhere, as does the disillusionment of idealistic students sure of their cause. It’s both instructive to look at failure and capitulation, when the students didn’t know that their demands would be granted just a little over a year later, and the complete absence of concern for the Indigenous populations who were the first people in this area to have been colonized. (1971, 117 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
---
Jean Rouch’s THE HUMAN PYRAMID (France/Ivory Coast)
Over his more than 50 years in the film industry, French director Jean Rouch focused primarily on feature-length and short documentary productions that mainly chronicled African rituals and traditional practices. The effect of colonialism on these traditional cultures is where he crosses the line into the ethnofiction for which he is best known, and THE HUMAN PYRAMID is a fine example of his work in this area. At the outset of THE HUMAN PYRAMID, Rouch explains to viewers that what they are about to see is the result of an experiment he has designed for Black African and white students of the Abidjan Lyceum in Ivory Coast. We see him talk to racially separate groups of these students to enlist their cooperation in improvising a film that deals with cross-cultural interactions. He assigns certain students in each group the role of bigot and films them as they discuss whether they want to mix with the other group. Whether these discussions are improvised or real is not clear, and it is in this way that Rouch hopes to get to a deeper truth about how different populations clash and cooperate with each other. While the players get a bit of time to introduce themselves in one way or another, the film perhaps inevitably revolves around Nadine, a beautiful French girl who is a new arrival in Abidjan and whose absentee parents have her starved for attention. A good deal of youthful activity ensues on the beach, at Nadine’s house, and at school, with Rouch peppering the film with scenes contrasting the luxurious white lifestyle with the dirt roads and shack-like houses in the city’s Black Treichville neighborhood. He also includes a traditional dance sequence filmed at night that was, for me, the best part of the film. The outright white bigots of the film almost never appear, but Nadine reveals the underlying allure and rejection of French colonial rule as she flirts with all of the boys while protesting that she is only treating them like the friends she considers them to be. I don’t really think Rouch’s approach accomplished his aim, and perhaps neither did he. He scripts a tragedy that forces Nadine to return to Paris, symbolically signaling Ivory Coast’s independence from French rule, which occurred on the heels of this film’s release. (1961, 90 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Maria Sødahl’s HOPE (Norway/Sweden/Denmark)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
Scandinavian filmmakers seem to have a particular affinity for stories of troubled marriages. Along with the brilliant marital dramas of such luminaries as Ingmar Bergman and Jan Troell, we must add Norwegian director Maria Sødahl’s masterful film HOPE. Two of the world’s finest actors, Andrea Bræin Hovig and Stellan Skarsgård, play Anja and Tomas, a long-time couple with a large, blended family of adult and dependent children. Anja is a dancer/choreographer who has just had a great success in Amsterdam, the first such opportunity in a long time. Tomas, a theatrical producer who is extremely busy and often absent from home, is about to start a new project. Their world is turned upside down when they learn that the lung cancer Anja was treated for the year before has metastasized to her brain. Sødahl, who also wrote the semi-autobiographical screenplay, moves deftly between Anja and Tomas’ home life filled with friends, family, and celebrations, and the medical diagnostics and consultations that begin just before Christmas and culminate in brain surgery on January 2. However, the main focus of the film is on Anja and Tomas, who are forced to face their emotional alienation. They are together, but not married, and it is easy to see that Anja has suffered the fate of many women, sacrificing her own career and tending to Tomas’ children with his ex-wife and the three they had together as Tomas happily immerses himself in his work. With death staring her in the face, Anja can finally voice how much she has felt like a convenience to him, challenging him to really stand beside her as a fully committed partner. It is a privilege to see two titans of cinema, under Sødahl’s sensitive direction, create not only two separate individuals, but also the “one” they have struggled for nearly two decades to become. Their intensely personal moments are handled with complexity and understanding, illuminating what it means to confront not only the fear of death, but also the fear of intimacy. (2019, 130 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Khyentse Norbu’s LOOKING FOR A LADY WITH FANGS AND A MOUSTACHE (Nepal/Mexico/Singapore)
Available for rent through the Music Box Theatre here
The clash between the modern world of science, technology, and secularism and the ancient world of religion, superstition, and mystery is always a topic ripe for examination. Perhaps no one is better equipped to take it on than Khyentse Norbu, a filmmaker who is also a Tibetan/Bhutanese lama who, at the age of 7, was recognized as the third incarnation of the founder of the Khyentse lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. Norbu caught the filmmaking bug after serving as a technical consultant to Bernardo Bertolucci during the filming of LITTLE BUDDHA (1993) and has four previous feature films to his name, all of which tap into his spiritual background. His fifth, LOOKING FOR A LADY WITH FANGS AND A MOUSTACHE, carries forward his preoccupation with the unseen world of the spirit and its place in a world where technology’s tentacles and the influence of Starbucks have reached even the most remote locations. Kathmandu has traditionally been a place where hippies have gone seeking enlightenment, drug-induced or otherwise, but many Nepalese in the city are running toward the culture of the "yellow haired." Tenzin (Tsering Tashi Gyalthang) is opening a coffee house that will appeal to Westerners. While looking for a location, he enters an abandoned shrine, filling his superstitious friend, Rabindra (Rabindra Singh Baniya), with fear for entering the “womb of the goddess” and taking photographs. Rabindra consults with a thoroughly modern monk (Ngawang Tenzin) who wears mirrored sunglasses and listens to music through high-end headphones about Tenzin’s transgression. The monk visits Tenzin and says that unless he can find a dakini, he will die in seven days. Like those afflicted with a voodoo curse, Tenzin’s primitive mind could cause his death, and his attempts to find a way out of this existential crisis create suspense and sincere hopes for a good outcome in the viewer. Of course, Norbu has compressed into seven days what all human beings will ultimately face, and it is through this compression that he awakens us to the often ridiculous rituals we engage in to preserve ourselves. His camera frequently refuses to look around physical obstacles to follow his characters; it’s surprising how frustrating it can feel not to be able to see all of the action, but that’s the point. We are, he suggests, missing the immaterial but real elements at foot in our world. Norbu has deep affection for humanity and our foibles, and LOOKING FOR A LADY is filled with wonderful comic moments. For example, he shoots Tenzin in the monk’s home looking through spaces on shelves otherwise filled with cereal boxes. The monk says he was raised on cereal in Canada and that “cereal is all that stands between me and enlightenment.” Norbu also revels in the beauty of Nepal and its music, particularly when Tenzin goes to visit his mother and accompanies her on a stringed instrument as she sings the old songs she loves so much. Indeed, I would be remiss not to point out the excellence of the soundtrack, which mixes Tom Waits singing “A Little Rain” effortlessly with the Mexican song “Cucurrucucú Paloma” and Eastern sounds. Most of all, the director elevates the importance of women, suggesting that a dakini is thought of as feminine because, at its essence, it is life itself. (2019, 113 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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]
Kaouther Ben Hania’s THE MAN WHO SOLD HIS SKIN (Tunisia/France/Germany/Belgium)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here and the Music Box Theatre here
In 2017, Swedish filmmaker Ruben Östlund skewered both art-world pretensions and European capitalist myopia in THE SQUARE, in which a hapless museum curator’s professional and personal impotence reflected the failures of a system built on the marginalization of Others. Kaouther Ben Hania’s 2020 satire THE MAN WHO SOLD HIS SKIN feels like something of a companion to Östlund’s work, or maybe a gentle rejoinder to the idea that a film about exploitation or xenophobia should focus on the follies of the exploiters rather than the dignity of the exploited. The protagonist here is someone who appears only on the periphery of so many critiques of white European complacency: Sam (Yahya Mahayni), a Syrian refugee who smuggles himself into Lebanon to escape his country’s civil war. He is devastated that his girlfriend, Abeer (Dea Liane), has gone her separate way to Belgium, pressured by her parents to marry a diplomat. But Sam finds a potential path to freedom in one Jeffrey Godefroy (Koen De Bouw), a renowned Belgian conceptual artist exhibiting in Beirut. The self-described Mephistopheles makes the desperate refugee an offer: he will help Sam get to Belgium if Sam agrees to lend his body to Jeffrey’s next artistic opus. And so, Jeffrey uses Sam’s skin as his canvas by tattooing across his back an enormous Schengen visa, a sign of geographic mobility that ironically transforms Sam into a chained commodity, an object to be gawked at by museum patrons and bought by wealthy private collectors at auction. While Hania executes this premise with a heavy hand—subtext is often made groaningly explicit, as in the aforementioned Faust allusion—THE MAN WHO SOLD HIS SKIN also carries power in its directness. To witness the blatant objectification of Sam, from his point of view and not that of the smug Jeffrey or his assistant Soraya (Monica Belluci, dryly haughty), is to confront in a unique way the systematic, dehumanizing treatment of refugees and immigrants, to say nothing of a late-capitalist global reality where literally nothing tangible or immaterial is impervious to commoditization. THE MAN WHO SOLD HIS SKIN makes its points, is often strikingly composed (Hania goes all in on mirrors and split-screen effects), and in the end feels just outlandish enough to somehow be possible (the story, in fact, was inspired by Wim Delvoye’s living tattooed art installation, “Tim”). (2020, 103 min) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
Oscar-Nominated Animated Short Films
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here and 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 Facets Cinémathèque here, 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]
Oscar-Nominated Live Action Short Films
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here, the Gene Siskel Film Center here and the Music Box Theatre 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]
Jasmila Žbanić’s QUO VADIS, AIDA? (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
How does one depict real-world atrocity, convey the scope and gravity of events that largely defy representation? One narrative approach is to center the experiences of a single character, through whose intimate perspective we can even begin to comprehend the human-scale toll of the unconscionable. This is the strategy of Jasmila Žbanić’s QUO VADIS, AIDA?, a wrenching, almost real-time procedural-style account of events leading up to the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which over 8,000 Bosniak Muslim boys and men were murdered by Bosnian Serb soldiers. The film focuses on the titular Aida (Jasna Đuričić), a former grade school teacher and a translator for the UN in the designated “safe area” of Srebrenica. When the Army of Republika Srpska invades the town in July of 1995, thousands of Bosnians make their way to a UN base run by a Dutch Protection Force unit; many are allowed inside, but most are forced to stay behind the gates, sweltering in the sun. Although Aida is able to use her credentials to get her husband and two young adult sons inside, their security is increasingly precarious. Soon, after negotiations are made on the basis that the Army of Republika Srpska will peacefully transfer the refugees, Bosnian Serb soldiers begin loading people onto buses. Women, men, and children are separated. Aida, leveraging her insider position, unleashes her ferocious mama bear to do her damndest to make sure her boys are not taken. Amidst the roiling chaos (the huge crowd shots are orchestrated by Žbanić and cinematographer Christine A. Maier with a lucid sense of movement and scale), a recurring image is of Aida, with her blue jacket and laminated tag, racing indefatigably through the halls, trying to stop both military terrorists and the alleged allies of UN bureaucracy from enabling genocide. QUO VADIS, AIDA? is blunt in its condemnation of the deadly inaction (and explicitly deadly action) of the UN, whose ineffectual Dutchbat guards all but handed over Srebrenica to the Bosnian Serb forces. In the face of this heinous institutional and moral failure, Đuričić turns Aida from a harried but steadfast pragmatist into an apoplectic supernova; one can palpably feel her exasperation and fierce maternal instinct enlarge her diminutive figure, taking it to the verge of explosion. In her fury, sorrow, and hard-bitten resilience, she provides an unforgettable face to an unfathomable historical chapter. (2020, 103 min) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
Emma Seligman’s SHIVA BABY (US)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here and the Music Box Theatre 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]
Charlène Favier’s SLALOM (France/Belgium)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
Elite athletics is a perilous place for youngsters. Freighted with demanding coaches, strict and often punishing training regimes, and physical hazards like anorexia, amenorrhea, and injury, it’s not a track most parents would choose for their children. Yet the exhilaration and accolades of competing often make it the course children choose for themselves, not realizing that they may be risking much more than they realized. That is certainly the case with Lyz Lopez (Noée Abita), a teenage Alpine skier with Olympic dreams and the talent to realize them. Her father is absent, and her mother (Muriel Combeau) is the opposite of a sports mom, barely taking an interest in Lyz’s training and aspirations. Quite naturally, Lyz looks to her coach, Fred (Jérémie Renier), for approval. Once she becomes a winner, he focuses a great deal of attention on her and eventually rapes her. In her first full-length feature, director Charlène Favier offers an unflinching look at a teenage girl wrestling with her emotions as an angry, disappointed man comes close to destroying her while insisting he is helping her achieve her dreams. Favier’s close observations reveal the complicated situation of the two main protagonists while surrounding them with supporting characters who help paint a portrait of the elite sports world in all its pain and glory. Footage of the ski runs is thrilling, and the location shooting in Val-d’Isère, a mecca for competitive skiing in the French Alps, provides a perfect backdrop for the beauty and danger Lyz faces as she tries to discover her strength in a fraught situation. SLALOM is a riveting, horrifying film that goes behind the headlines to show exactly what some of these young athletes suffer. (2020, 92 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Rohmer x 4
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre
Éric Rohmer’s A TALE OF SUMMER (France)
Available to rent here
A TALE OF SUMMER, French director Éric Rohmer’s third in his “Tales of the Four Seasons” series, might be called quintessential Rohmer. Following a young man named Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud), the film uses the beachy, sunny landscape of Brittany, creating a “walk and talk” of sorts, as Gaspard meets various women over the course of his pre-career-starting vacation. Sans a soundtrack, with Rohmer’s characteristically simple, yet stunning visuals, A TALE OF SUMMER revels in Gaspard’s inability to choose between three women: Margot (Amanda Langlet), Solène (Gwenaëlle Simon), and Léna (Aurelia Nolin). While waiting for Léna, his on-and-off again girlfriend, Rohmer’s just-graduated, curly-haired protagonist meets local waitress Margot, spending his days meandering on the beach, chatting about her interest in ethnology, his musical ramblings, and the ideas surrounding a summer fling. Despite its affinity for romantics, the light drama is baked in a dose of reality, unwilling to flatter Gaspard, but rather taking every moment as a stroke of luck in his life. It harkens back to the freedom and levity of summer, before your career, family, and responsibilities fill your days. A level of uncertainty and opportunity feel limitless for Gaspard in this way, in that each chance encounter could lead to something as beautiful as love. As with some of us, when bouts of lust or passion come, we feel like they’re bound for destruction. Gaspard is no different, enacting a woeful tone with the innate knowledge that none of these romances will likely work out. Like several other Rohmer dramas, A TALE OF SUMMER focuses on the flaky nature of young love in all of its hopefulness and hopelessness. As Gaspard’s situations becomes hazier, by meeting the more-excitable Solène and the return of the less-committed Léna, he begins thinking and deciding in each moment what he will do next, with little to no concern for the girls’ well-being. Still, Margot remains a constant, a smile that seems to shine a bit brighter, a friendship that has more stakes than his two strictly romantic dealings. And this relationship swells into one of many points in A TALE OF SUMMER: friendship is as, if not more, serious than romance. (1996, 113 min) [Michael Frank]
---
Éric Rohmer's A TALE OF AUTUMN (France)
Available to rent here
With A TALE OF AUTUMN, Éric Rohmer, cinema’s great observer of the psychology of the human heart, made what must be, in its characteristically modest way, one of the finest of romantic comedies. It’s warm and rather magical, even profound, in its elegant simplicity. The final film in the “Tales of the Four Seasons” cycle, it was made by a Rohmer who was in his late seventies, but arguably possessed of a keener-than-ever eye for the vagaries of friendship and love. The setting is a small, sun-kissed town in the Rhone Valley in southern France (Pont-Saint-Esprit and environs), gloriously illuminated by cinematographer Diane Baratier. It’s about two forty-something best friends, Isabelle (Marie Riviere), a happily married bookseller, and Magoli (Beatrice Romand), a widowed winegrower, as well as the cross-generational friendship between Magoli and Rosine (Alexia Portal), a twenty-something student who’s dallying with Magoli’s son, Leo. Noticing her loneliness, Magoli’s two friends plot, independently, to find her a man. Rosine wants to fix Magoli up with Etienne (Didier Sandre), her ex-philosophy prof (and ex-lover), with whom she’s struggling to establish the boundaries of a friendship. Meanwhile, Isabelle clandestinely places a personal ad in the local paper on Magoli’s behalf: though Magoli would like to meet someone, she feels she could never love someone she met through a “ploy.” Like a typical Rohmer hero, Magoli has a predicament, but also a certain ethical and philosophical code to which she dedicates herself uncompromisingly—whether it helps or hinders. The true Rohmer surrogate here, though, is Isabelle: watch how closely she observes other people, the way she lets her “actors” believe they are running the show, even as she’s discreetly setting the stage. Gerald (Alain Libolt) is the gentleman who answers the ad, and Isabelle begins secretly meeting with him, adopting an identity based on Magoli to vet him. Misunderstandings and mistaken identities ensue in a way that never quite feels clichéd, as Isabelle plans for Magoli and Gerald to meet “accidentally” at her daughter Emilia’s upcoming wedding. As acting, as writing, as direction, the film is so alive to the stories that faces and gestures tell—of hope against hope, of awareness of experience: glances and touches suffused with affection and intelligence. I loved watching these visages light up with the bloom of love, trust, and happy surprise at the continued possibility of both. I’d adored the younger versions of Riviere and Romand as seen in two earlier Rohmer films: Riviere as the somewhat neurotic protagonist of THE GREEN RAY (1986), unwilling to dissemble in matters of the heart, and Romand as the delightfully articulate and self-possessed teenager in CLAIRE’S KNEE (1970). It is stirring to see them again here, in middle age. In fact, like Gerald, I found myself falling in love with both of them a bit. (The film leaves tantalizingly open the question of whether Isabelle hadn’t started to fall in love with Gerald a bit, as well.) Meanwhile, Rohmer simply observes it all, as if to say, isn’t it all so beautiful: the wind in the trees, the way the sunlight falls on a woman’s hair as the day wanes? Aren’t human beings beautiful, and aren’t we a mystery, in our fumbling, confused way? And doesn’t the world Rohmer creates—in which life often seems to work out, by whatever mysterious combination of luck, fate, and demiurge, so that we meet the right people at the right time—resonate with our own experience? That’s not always an easy feeling to sustain, but whenever I’m watching one of the best films of Éric Rohmer—which A TALE OF AUTUMN most certainly is—my answer to these questions is always “yes.” (1998, 120 min) [Scott Pfeiffer]
---
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]
---
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]
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]
Chris McKim's WOJNAROWICZ: FUCK YOU FAGGOT FUCKER (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here and the Music Box Theatre 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
Sound of Silent Film Festival
Two different programs of silent short films are showing IRL at outdoor screenings this weekend and virtually next weekend. The outdoor screenings are at VIN312 Parking Lot at 4710 N. Ravenswood Ave. Program One is on Friday at 8:30pm and Program Two is on Saturday at 8:30pm (both are close to sold out). More information and tickets 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.
Facets Cinémathèque
Check the Facets website for hold-over titles.
Gene Siskel Film Center
Anthony Chen’s 2019 Singaporean/Taiwanese film WET SEASON (103 min) and Grímur Hákonarson’s 2019 Icelandic film THE COUNTY (92 min) are 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 journalist and curator Sergio Mims (Mondays in April and May). Details here.
Music Box Theatre
Grímur Hákonarson’s 2019 Icelandic film THE COUNTY (92 min), Noah Hutton’s 2020 documentary IN SILICO (83 min), and Ulrike Ottinger’s 2020 German documentary PARIS CALLIGRAMMES (131 min) are all available for streaming beginning this week. Check the Music Box website for hold-over titles.
🎞️ ADDITIONAL ONLINE SCREENINGS
Profile: Melika Bass (US)
Streaming through the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen between May 1-5 with an all-access pass here
Though they’re striking for myriad reasons, Melika Bass’ films are most affecting to me on a sonic level. In the conspicuous absence of dialogue, numerous stories are told; in the chilling sound effects, ghosts make their presence known. This well-deserved survey of Bass’ work is connected by specters, haunting the films as they do the viewers. Born and raised in the South (though now based in Chicago), Bass imbues her work with a distinct Southern Gothic sensibility, as well as with a confounding impression of timelessness that adds further layers to the inscrutable narratives. Program 1 (May 1-4) includes SONGS FROM THE SHED (2008, 23 min) and SHOALS (2011, 52 min). In the former, three people compose a chosen family of sorts; each character has his or her own section where they go about activities at once mundane and haunting. In several scenes, a character called Thistle, having left the home he shares with the others, wanders the streets, the image of him blurry, like a shifting figure in an old photograph. There’s no spoken dialogue—the only conversation that takes place is conveyed through title cards, like in a silent film—but there’s frequently music and, in the absence of that, the sound of whatever’s occurring on screen, from the sound of a saw cutting through wood to the soothing refrain of rain pattering down on water. SHOALS likewise centers on bizarre, inexplicably entwined relationships: three young women attend the Osterider School for Girls, housed in a wooden building in the middle of a prairie, where they’re led by a cult-like figure (played by local filmmaker and animator Chris Sullivan). This has spoken dialogue unlike SONGS, as Sullivan’s character engages the women in enigmatic philosophical and pseudo-scientific discourse; the longest of the five works in this retrospective, it contains more opaque sequences of its inhabitants participating in bizarre rituals and disconcerting behavior. Program 2 (May 3-5) begins with TURN THE GARDEN (2016, 8 min), a commission by the Chicago Film Archives that’s made up of footage from films in their collection, with “sound and volumes” by Coppice. Old home-movie clips have an inherently ghostly quality, and Bass exploits that condition to its unsettling denouement. The inanity of joy is displayed in stark contrast with sequences of burning buildings and landscapes; feelings evoked by the images are contradicted by feelings evoked through the bombinating sound, a juxtaposition that marks much of Bass’ output. The longer works in this program, WAKING THINGS (2012, 34 min) and CREATURE COMPANION (2018, 31 min), are both specific and immense, symbiotic with one another across space and time. Similar to SONGS, WAKING THINGS involves three people who co-exist together without explanation as to how they’re connected. And again on-screen text announces the characters’ identities—the scarcity of dialogue and use of titles in much of Bass’ work recalls silent cinema, though, ironically, it’s what can be heard in her films that most distinguishes them. No less is the case in WAKING THINGS. Set seemingly in the past, a curious trio—each with a specific designation, such as “Mislav the Sourseed”—prepares a feast for some outlanders coming to visit. It feels like an obliterated history, of a time forgotten or that perhaps never existed at all. Using a contemporary setting, CREATURE COMPANION embodies an equivalently uncanny disposition. Two women explore their own bodies and one another’s as they interact with their domestic space in the suburbs. It’s an extraordinary consideration of that sort of outlying area as a setting in film; a through line in Bass’ oeuvre is her stunning aesthetic, on display both as she probes imagined histories and prosaic realities, turning each into its own cinematic tableau. But as befits Bass’ stratified talent, it’s more than what one sees, or even what one hears. The simplest of actions, ideas, and beliefs take on new meaning in her world, the surely idiosyncratic style a mere hint at what lingers beneath the surface. [Kathleen Sachs]
CINE-LIST: April 30 - May 6, 2021
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Cody Corrall, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Michael Frank, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Raphael Jose Martinez, Scott Pfeifer, Michael Glover Smith