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.
Check the venues’ websites for information on safety protocols and other procedures put in place.
New on the Blog: An interview by Cine-File contributor Raphael Jose Martinez with filmmaker Beth B. and No Wave iconoclast Lydia Lunch, director and subject of the 2019 documentary LYDIA LUNCH: THE WAR IS NEVER OVER, which is available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here. See our review below.
📽️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS
Music Box Theatre
Heidi Ewing’s I CARRY YOU WITH ME (US/Mexico)
Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes
Representing the fiction feature debut of documentarian Heidi Ewing (JESUS CAMP, DETROPIA), I CARRY YOU WITH ME functions as a poignant example of two identity-themed narrative modes: the immigrant drama and the LGBTQ romance. It’s also a bittersweet memory piece, in which formative experiences of home, family, and childhood trauma percolate to the surface in the present, revealing psychic residues that never completely fade. In present-day New York City, middle-aged Iván is flooded by such recollections, sending us back in time and place to Puebla, Mexico, in 1994. There, a young-adult Iván (Armando Espitia) works as a lowly dishwasher, a position he’s overqualified for as a graduate of a culinary school. Things aren’t much rosier in his personal life, as he struggles to spend time with his young son from a previous failed marriage. A spark of hope comes to the forlorn bachelor in the form of Gerardo (Christian Vázquez), who eyes Iván from across the dance floor of a gay nightclub, tracing him with a laser pointer that will come to symbolize more than just the arrow of Cupid. The closeted Iván is enlivened by the out Gerardo; neither, however, is accepted by their families, whose culturally masculinist, homophobic attitudes are sketched in flashbacks to both men’s childhoods. When Iván decides to cross the border to realize his dream as a chef in the United States, it marks the beginning of a long and arduous journey of displacement, exile, and yearning between the fated lovers. With its nonlinear structure, I CARRY YOU WITH ME has obvious poetic aims, and often reaches them in sequences of airy, Malickian sensuousness. At other times, it can feel weighed down by prosaic exposition, while the perpetually dusky color palette doesn’t always befit its fluctuating affective landscape. Perhaps this is Ewing still finding her footing in narrative filmmaking. Where the film excels is in its attunement to the multiple overlapping targets that follow queer people and immigrants, and in its dramatization of the geographic and mental indeterminacy that often attends sociopolitical marginalization. The film’s real-world resonance becomes apparent in a third-act recontextualization I won’t spoil here. Suffice it to say, I CARRY YOU WITH ME ends like a celebration, not an elegy. (2020, 111 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
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Also showing at the Music Box Theatre are Peter Jackson’s THE LORD OF THE RINGS Trilogy, which includes THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING (2001, 178 min, 35mm), THE TWO TOWERS (2002, 179 min, 35mm), and THE RETURN OF THE KING (2003, 201 min, 35mm) and Michael Sarnoski’s 2020 film PIG (92 min, DCP Digital), starring Nicolas Cage. Check Venue website for showtimes and the Music Box Garden Series line-up.
Comfort Film
ASIAN POP-UP CINEMA Presents: Bernard Rose’s SAMURAI MARATHON 1855 (Japan)
Comfort Film at Comfort Station (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave. – Outdoor Screening) – Wednesday, 8pm [Free Admission]
This samurai action film marks the latest from cult favorite Bernard Rose (CANDYMAN, IMMORTAL BELOVED). Inspired by real events, it takes place near the end of the Edo period and before the arrival of American troops to Japan. (2019, 104 min, Digital Projection)
Rooftop Cinema @ Analog
Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s THE LURE (Poland)
Analog Rooftop Cinema at Borelli's Pizzeria (2124 W. Lawrence Ave.) – Friday, 9pm
With most fairy tales, it’s easy to go back to the source material to envision a more terrifying adaptation than the Disney-fied ones to which we’ve become accustomed. THE LURE does just that with Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Little Mermaid,” drawing on the original tale’s darkness and turning sweet mermaids into vampiric sirens. Set in the colorful club-scene of a fictional 1980s Warsaw, the film isn’t just a horror picture, but a full-blown musical. Two mermaid sisters, Golden (Michalina Olszańska) and Silver (Marta Mazurek) join up with a rock band and eventually start their own singing act. It gets messy, however, when Silver falls for the bass player and, oh yes, the sisters develop a thirst for blood. It’s as bizarre as it sounds, as the film contains a musical number in a shopping mall and obsessive shots of the sisters’ tails, which are not beautiful emerald fins, but fleshy, realistic fish appendages. The film doesn’t shy away from the constant sexual objectification the young mermaids face as they become part of the club scene. Olszańska and Mazurek expertly navigate the emotional themes of this dark coming-of-age story, primarily through their singing. (It doesn’t hurt that some of the musical performances are genuinely great.) Director Agnieszka Smoczyńska marries outwardly disjointed styles seamlessly; the whole film is an ingenious work of imagination that leans into the delight of an 80s mermaid club act and the melancholy reality of life beyond the safety of the water. THE LURE would make a fantastic double-feature with Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 cult classic HOUSE—both are genre-distorting horrors about adolescence, bursting with unabashed girlish whimsy while still delivering terror. (2015, 92 min) [Megan Fariello]
Christian Petzold’s UNDINE (Germany)
Analog Rooftop Cinema at Borelli's Pizzeria (2124 W. Lawrence Ave.) – Saturday, 9pm
Christian Petzold is a director for whom history is both subject and inspiration. He used a partitioned Germany to tell a riveting personal story of dedication and sacrifice in BARBARA (2012), and with UNDINE, he returns to partition—more specifically, the partition of Berlin—as the historical bookmark in a story that conjures up longstanding mythological dimensions in German music and literature. The film re-teams Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski, whose mysterious bond in TRANSIT (2018) Petzold hasn’t quite gotten out of his system, to tell a full-on, ardent love story between Beer’s Undine Wibeau (last name straight out of a story by Goethe), a historian who lectures tourists on the architectural development of East and West Berlin, and Christoph (Rogowski), a commercial diver. The film opens on Undine looking stricken when her lover, Johannes (Jacob Matschenz), breaks up with her. She makes the bizarre statement that if he doesn’t love her anymore, she will have to kill him. Fortunately for him, only 30 minutes after this unsettling encounter, Undine meets Christoph, whose awkwardness causes him to bang into some shelving, sending an aquarium at the top crashing down on them both; laying on the floor in the aquarium water, they magically fall in love. Petzold channels Beer’s irresistible strangeness from TRANSIT to create the character of Undine, a creature who can live as an ordinary woman only in the arms of love. Petzold seems to be making a connection between his country’s pagan past and the destruction and restoration of a centuries-old palace that used to form Berlin’s center, but the link might be too tenuous and obscure for some viewers to understand. Nonetheless, Beer’s presence, even when she is lecturing, and the chemistry she and Rogowski share onscreen make for engaged viewing. (2020, 90 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Tickets cost $20 cash, which includes a drink.
The Logan Theatre, Landmark's Century Centre Cinema and Various Multiplexes
Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s SUMMER OF SOUL (US/Documentary)
See Venue websites for showtimes
Attended by 300,000 people, the Harlem Cultural Festival was a free concert series held in Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park) in the summer of 1969. Performers at the event included Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, B.B. King, Sly and the Family Stone, and Nina Simone. A celebration of Black music and history, the concert series and its cultural magnitude has been largely undiscussed, overshadowed by music festivals like Woodstock—which was held that same summer, one hundred miles away. The series was fully filmed, but footage remained unseen for years. Using that footage, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, in the musician’s debut feature film, directs SUMMER OF SOUL—subtitled …Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised—as part documentary and part concert film. Full performances are combined with interviews of attendees and musicians and archival material detailing the political and social climate in America at the time. Describing the specificity of Harlem as a community and the significance of the event to those participating, SUMMER OF SOUL grounds the vibrant and beautifully shot concert footage in robust context. It lets the variety of acts and musical genres and styles primarily be articulated in the outstanding stage performances and the reactions from the audience in the park. An early and incredibly effective moment in the documentary shows singer Marilyn McCoo of the 5th Dimension becoming emotional as she watches herself performing on the Harlem Cultural Festival stage; she so well expresses the significance of Black musicians playing music for a Black audience, a theme that runs throughout. SUMMER OF SOUL is an important reframing of the history of American 60s counterculture, a jubilant celebration, and a great reminder that music is not always just a reflection of challenging times but can also itself be revolutionary. (2021, 117 min, Digital Projection) [Megan Fariello]
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – New Reviews
Courtney Stephens and Pacho Velez’s THE AMERICAN SECTOR (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
For those of us who witnessed it, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was a surprise and the beginning of a sea change in the world order as we knew it. In the ensuing years, sections of the Wall were sold to interested buyers all over the world as historical artifacts and, in some cases, works of graffiti art. Co-directors Courtney Stephens and Pacho Velez spent more than a year crisscrossing the United States to places where one can view pieces of the Wall. The often-random distribution of Wall sections is quite interesting. The film opens with one concrete monolith sitting isolated in the middle of a forest. Two others show up at the side of an interstate highway, apparently not even near a rest stop. Southern California has more Wall segments than any other part of the country, though no one seems to know why. More expected are the museums and other institutions that house segments and chunks, including the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library, where a rather beautiful sculpture shows bronze horses in active motion trampling the Wall underfoot. I was excited to learn that a part of the wall lives inside the Brown Line’s Western ‘L’ station, which I went in and out of for years when I lived in Lincoln Square, an ethnic German neighborhood. Perhaps most fascinating is an audio recording of Stephens speaking with someone at CIA headquarters, who explains that many clearances would be needed for Stephens and Velez to film the section at Langley. The spokeswoman says that people working for the CIA wondered whether the end of the Cold War meant that the agency would be disbanded—how naïvely quaint. I’m not sure that THE AMERICAN SECTOR makes any grand statements, despite its closing words of how we are back to building walls again, but it sure is a fun ride. (2020, 69 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Beth B.’s LYDIA LUNCH: THE WAR IS NEVER OVER (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
For those unfamiliar with Lydia Lunch, a short primer: Lunch is a prolific multidisciplanary artist and shit-stirrer who began her career in late-1970s New York. Initially known for her work in such (in)famous No Wave bands as Teenage Jesus and The Jerks, Beirut Slump, and 8-Eyed Spy and for her collaborations with filmmakers Richard Kern, Nick Zedd, Vivienne Dick, and Beth B., Lunch has gone on to work with artists ranging from Nick Cave to Hubert Selby Jr. to Weasel Walter over the ensuing decades. LYDIA LUNCH: THE WAR IS NEVER OVER, a new collaboration with Beth B., is a film essay of sorts. It isn’t a traditional biography showcasing art from Lunch’s past; rather, the film explores the overarching themes of her work. Placing as much attention on the work she’s doing now as on her heroic years as a teenager/twentysomething, THE WAR IS NEVER OVER explores how the motivations behind Lunch’s art—her unique takes on feminist, sexual, and artistic politics—have never wavered and how they may be more relevant today than ever. The film is still filled with absolutely blistering archival footage, not to mention equally jaw-dropping contemporary performances. For fans of Lydia Lunch, this is absolutely essential; for those who have only heard her name in passing, this is the perfect overview. Like Lunch’s work, the film is direct, running barely over an hour. And every minute is worth it. (2019, 75 mins) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
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Read an interview with filmmaker Beth B. and the film’s subject, Lydia Lunch, on the blog here.
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Held Over/Still Screening/Return Engagements (Selected)
Roy Andersson’s ABOUT ENDLESSNESS (Sweden)
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here and the Music Box Theatre 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]
Jafar Panahi’s CRIMSON GOLD (Iran)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here and the Music Box Theatre here
Abbas Kiarostami receives screenplay credit on Jafar Panahi’s fourth feature, CRIMSON GOLD, and one of the many compelling things about the film is how it plays like an inversion of Kiarostami’s TASTE OF CHERRY. That film told the story of one man’s efforts to find someone to bury him after he commits suicide; the hero’s quest, which confirms his connection to other people, is ultimately life-affirming in spite of its morbid nature. CRIMSON GOLD opens with a botched robbery that ends with the hero’s suicide, then flashes back to show the days leading up to that event; it’s a despairing journey that builds upon Panahi’s depiction of modern-day Tehran as an unforgiving hellhole that he introduced in THE CIRCLE. As in TASTE OF CHERRY, the hero’s progress is marked by three encounters, though here, the hero doesn’t initiate them. Hossain is a pizza delivery man, and the people he meets on his deliveries tend to regard him from the start as a social inferior. (Compare this with the gratitude with which the strangers regard Mr. Badii when he offers them rides in his SUV.) Each encounter reminds Hossain of his powerlessness within Iranian society, though, ironically, each one hinges on a moment of camaraderie. In the first, Hossain recognizes his customer as a military buddy from the Iran-Iraq War; the old acquaintance, embarrassed to see Hossain reduced to delivering pizzas, leaves Hossain with kind words and a handsome tip. The delivery man is unable to complete his second delivery, as the apartment building he’s supposed to enter has been surrounded by a police tactical unit, which waits in ambush for people leaving a party with illegal drinking and dancing on the second floor. The officer in charge of the unit berates Hossain for trying to enter the building, but forbids him from leaving the scene, since he could find a phone somewhere and warn the partygoers about their impending arrest. Hossain has a poignant conversation with a teenage soldier before deciding to share his undelivered pizzas with policemen lying in wait. The third key encounter of CRIMSON GOLD takes place in the high-rise condo of a rich man whose apartment has just been vacated by two female guests. Feeling spurned and lonely, the rich man invites Hossain in for dinner. He’s much nicer to Hossain than the wealthy jewelry store owner who’d condescended to him in an earlier scene; still, the apparent randomness of the rich man’s kindness—which Hossain clearly recognizes—speaks to the great, and likely insurmountable, social divide between him and Hossain. Like Kiarostami’s decision to place the hero’s death at the start of the movie, the scene in the high-rise makes Hossain’s act of desperation seem inevitable. Heightening the film’s morbid air is the ghostlike lead performance by Hossain Emadeddin, an actual pizza delivery man and an actual paranoid schizophrenic. Emaddedin’s deadpan under-reaction to practically everything borders on comical, yet it also reflects the inability of isolated, working-poor individuals to impact the system that degrades them. (2003, 96 min) [Ben Sachs]
Cathy Yan’s DEAD PIGS (China)
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here
Writing for MUBI about the influences on her debut feature, DEAD PIGS, writer-director Cathy Yan cited two films—Robert Altman’s NASHVILLE and Paul Thomas Anderson’s MAGNOLIA—and several contemporary photographers. These influences play out clearly in DEAD PIGS, an ambitious, multi-character narrative that’s rich in striking imagery. Like NASHVILLE and MAGNOLIA, the movie is as much about its setting (in this case, rapidly evolving Shanghai and its outskirts) as it is about the characters, and both are portrayed with a mix of sympathy and cynicism. Yan’s storytelling feels more closely aligned with Anderson’s than Altman’s: DEAD PIGS is not a hazy hang-out movie where the characters cross paths by chance (if at all), but rather a fully orchestrated affair in which people come together by destiny and grand fictional devices. Yan’s narrative machinations don’t become obvious for a while; for its first 20 or 30 minutes, DEAD PIGS hums along on the energy of the gliding camerawork and hyped-up cross-cutting, both of which convey a sense of constant activity befitting the ever-changing environment. The film largely takes place in two settings, old neighborhoods on the brink of demolition and the modern skyscrapers taking their place. Embodying the first of those settings is Candy Wang, a beauty parlor owner who refuses to leave the two-story home she was raised in, despite the fact that every other homeowner on her block has sold their property to a large-scale development firm, which has already razed all the other buildings before the movie starts. (Yan based the character on a real-life woman who helped start China’s “nailhouse” phenomenon of homeowners who refuse to leave their homes when developers attempt to demolish them.) Representing the new Shanghai is Sean, an American architect embarking on a career with the firm that wants to buy Candy’s house. A naive westerner who sees China’s wild capitalist dog race as an opportunity to make it big, Sean resembles the hero of John Maringouin’s gonzo independent production GHOSTBOX COWBOY (which premiered the same year as this), though DEAD PIGS never becomes a nightmare like Maringouin’s film does. The closest it gets is in the hideous spectacle of the title. Throughout the story, Shanghai is plagued by a disease that kills pigs by the thousands; the region’s poor pig farmers abandon the corpses in the rivers, and the image serves as a metaphor for the displaced victims of China’s avalanche-like urbanization. (2018, 122 min) [Ben Sachs]
Teona Strugar Mitevska’s GOD EXISTS, HER NAME IS PETRUNYA (North Macedonia)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
“It’s 2018, but it still feels like the Dark Ages in Macedonia,” says TV reporter Slavica (Labina Mitevska, sister of the film’s director). Slavica and her cameraman, Bojkan (Xhevdet Jashari), are in the small town of Štip to cover an unusual story—a woman named Petrunya (Zorica Nusheva) joined in a religious competition meant only for men and recovered the sought-after lucky cross tossed in the river by the town priest (Suad Begovski-Suhi). The townspeople, especially the young men who believe that Petrunya stole the cross from them, are scandalized and demand that she give it back or face dire consequences. But Petrunya broke no civil law, and the police who hold her for questioning aren’t quite sure what to do with her. The situation set up by Mitevska, who co-wrote the intelligent and perceptive screenplay with Elma Tataragic, examines the persistence of patriarchy in the modern world. Petrunya is a 32-year-old, overweight woman who lives with her supportive, but ineffectual father (Petar Mircevski) and her mother (Violeta Sapkovska), who seems to both hate Petrunya and want to keep her tied to her apron strings. A college graduate with a degree in history who has never had a job, Petrunya is humiliated when she applies for work with the manager of a garment factory (Mario Knezović). The entire set-up, with the manager sitting in a glass-walled office in the middle of a room full of women working at sewing machines, is masculine control writ large. Nusheva brings to life all of Petrunya’s frustration with her dead-end circumstances, her anger at her belittling mother, and her confusion about how to change her life—a confusion that impelled her to jump into the water to find the cross without even thinking. I had flashbacks to Jan. 6 watching the angry young men of the village mass at the police station and break through the glass door to visit their displeasure on Petrunya. They are the cross she and the other women in the film have had to bear their whole lives—one Petrunya finally realizes she doesn’t have to shoulder anymore. Inventively shot by DP Virginie Saint-Martin, the film tips into humor during the interview segments, with Slavica answering her own questions and airing her feminist viewpoint. It is during one of these interviews that we come to understand the film’s title. One of the townsmen says he doesn’t understand what the fuss is about. “What if god is a woman?” he says. What if, indeed. (2019, 100 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Jeanne Leblanc’s LES NÔTRES (Canada)
Available to rent through Facets Cinématheque here
Ripping the lid off a small town to reveal its depraved underbelly has long been a strategy for social criticism, but this had lost its sting around the time AMERICAN BEAUTY won the Best Picture Oscar. Yet Jeanne Leblanc’s film goes much deeper, generating a bleak tone that presents sexual abuse as horrible but banal. The streets of Sainte-Adeline, Quebec, are almost parodically broad, green and sunny. But the town is haunted by an industrial accident which killed 13-year-old Magalie’s (Emilie Bierre) father. After she passes out during a dance rehearsal at school, a doctor’s examination reveals that she’s in her second trimester of pregnancy. Her mother (Marianne Farley) and much of the town suspect that Magalie’s best friend Manu (Leon Diasco Pellettier) is the father. She receives harassing texts on her phone. But she has actually been groomed to believe she can consent to sex with Manu’s father Jean-Marc (Paul Doucet), the town’s mayor. Leblanc’s direction keeps its distance from the actors, framing them in medium shot. LES NÔTRES runs on barely suppressed tension, giving the audience more information than the characters. For a narrative which could have set out to shock or turn into melodrama, it’s actually fairly hushed. (On the soundtrack, crickets constantly chirp, melting into Marie-Heléne L. Delorme’s dark score.) Some images would fit perfectly in IT FOLLOWS, and LES NÔTRES suggests a horror film about a girl’s coming of age with all the metaphor and allegory stripped away. Bierre brings the character to life while preserving her inner mystery. The final shot, in which Magalie stares blankly at the camera, suggests the difficult life ahead of her while retaining the film’s reticence to speak too loudly. (2020, 103 min) [Steve Erickson]
Seth McClellan’s OTHERS BEFORE SELF: VOICES FROM THE TIBETAN CHILDREN’S VILLAGE (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
Due to the outreach efforts and charisma of His Holiness the Dalai Lama of Tibet, the world has learned of and largely sympathized with the plight of the Tibetan people, whose land was seized some 60 years ago by the People’s Republic of China. The Chinese outlawed the country’s language, culture, and religion, and continue to oppress, torture, and kill Tibetans. To keep Tibetan traditions and hope alive, the Dalai Lama established the Tibetan Children’s Village (TCV) in the Himalayan mountains of India. OTHERS BEFORE SELF offers a brief, but complete portrait of the TCV, where teachers act like parents for the children separated from their families in Tibet and the children learn English and take classes in Tibetan language and culture. Most importantly, the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism—compassion, love, others before self—are passed on to them in the hope that they will eschew bitterness as they grow up and move out into the world. The residents of the TCV, even some of the youngest, speak for themselves and their feelings about the Chinese government (not the people), which they see as greedy and selfish. They give voice to their hope, or lack thereof, of being able to see Tibet, most for the first time, and reclaim it for the Tibetan people. In showing a group of children working together and developing their minds and hearts, McClellan has painted an effective portrait of how we could create a more peaceful, pleasant world community. The cynic/realist in me thinks we’re doomed, but the dreamer in me was inspired by this moving, beautifully filmed documentary. (2021, 55 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Suzanne Lindon’s SPRING BLOSSOM (France)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
Suzanne Lindon was just 20 years old when SPRING BLOSSOM (which she wrote, directed, and starred in) received its virtual premiere at the 2020 Cannes Film Festival, making her one of the youngest filmmakers—if not the youngest—to have a film in competition there. It is very much a young person’s movie, for better and for worse. On the one hand, Lindon conveys youthful feelings of vulnerability, restlessness, and self-involvement with striking accuracy; on the other, the film sometimes comes off as simple and naive, and Lindon’s tendency to place herself at the front and center of the scene makes the film’s self-regarding perspective indistinguishable from the one it depicts. SPRING BLOSSOM doesn’t approach the level of narcissism that Vincent Gallo reached with THE BROWN BUNNY, but it seems to come from a similar place, as Lindon demands viewers watch herself as she watches herself. Underscoring the personal nature of the project, Lindon plays a character named Suzanne. A seemingly well-adjusted 16-year-old Paris high school student, Suzanne is tired of her routine: she’s introduced surrounded by friends, their conversation muffled into background noise, as she finds herself unable to engage with them with much interest. One afternoon, Suzanne notices an actor outside a theater where the play he’s in is being performed. She becomes smitten with the older man (whom, we later learn, is 35), and gradually works her way into an acquaintance with him, setting up “accidental” meetings until he decides to invite her to a cafe on his own. Viewers dreading the story of an illicit sexual relationship will be pleasantly surprised to find that Lindon keeps the budding romance chaste, focusing on Suzanne’s growing confidence rather than her sexual awakening. Raphael, the actor, may come off as something of a cipher (the film never establishes convincingly why he’d welcome the romantic attention of a high school student), but Arnaud Valois at least succeeds in making him not seem like a creep. Lindon parts with realism in a few unexpected sequences where the characters break out in choreographed movements (it would be an overstatement to call it dancing), putting their ineffable feelings into moving images. The technique, like most of SPRING BLOSSOM, walks such a thin line between charm and preciousness that it will probably take another few films before Lindon falls decisively on one side or the other. That’s just fine—she certainly has time. (2020, 74 min) [Ben Sachs]
Melvin Van Peebles’ THE STORY OF A THREE-DAY PASS (France)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
THE STORY OF A THREE-DAY PASS, the first feature by influential independent Melvin Van Peebles, inspires comparisons with Jean-Luc Godard’s BREATHLESS with its intercontinental romance and jazzy montage, but a more fitting point-of-reference may be the films of William Klein, another American expatriate working in France when this was made. Like Klein, Van Peebles shifts frequently between naturalism and cartoonish exaggeration, and he exhibits a chic visual sensibility throughout. (The black-and-white cinematography is by Michel Kelber, whose long filmography includes Jean Renoir’s FRENCH CANCAN and Nicholas Ray’s BITTER VICTORY.) The three-day pass in question belongs to Turner, a Black American soldier who’s stationed in France. The white superior officer who grants the leave makes clear that he’s doing so to reward Turner for his obsequious behavior; in fact, he promises Turner a promotion when he gets back. The protagonist has mixed feelings about all this, and Van Peebles dramatizes the character’s ambivalence through scenes where he talks to another version of himself in the bathroom mirror, the mirror-image raising doubts and even calling his double an Uncle Tom. Turner manages to put his concerns aside when he leaves his base for Paris, enjoying himself first as a tourist and then as a paramour, entering into a romance with a white Frenchwoman named Miriam. Van Peebles presents their relationship in a freewheeling, Nouvelle Vague-like style, though the aesthetic doesn’t distract from the obstacles they face in finding happiness. Everywhere the couple goes, they’re met with dirty looks, insidious questions, and even physical confrontations; things reach their worst when Turner runs into some suspicious fellow (white) soldiers when he and Miriam are on the beach. The impediments to interracial romance are portrayed, alternately, as scary and comic. In one of the more inspired visuals, Van Peebles cuts from the couple’s first time in bed to a shot of Miriam being surrounded by a group of Africans in traditional tribal garb. This sort of bold imagery points ahead to Van Peebles’ incendiary classic SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSSSS SONG (1971), the film with which the writer-director would cement his reputation. (1967, 88 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Zaida Bergroth’s TOVE (Finland)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
Coming-of-age stories are normally thought of as involving teenagers who learn the realities of adult life. In fact, we all come of age again and again as we pass through new phases of our lives. The unique coming-of-age tale director Zaida Bergroth tells in the biopic TOVE covers roughly 10 years in the life of Tove Jansson, a Finnish artist best known for her fanciful Moomin children’s books. Tove (Alma Pöysti) is 30 years old when the narrative begins in 1944. She is living at her parents’ home in Helsinki, trying to emerge as a serious artist from the long shadow of her censorious father, sculptor Viktor Jansson (Robert Enckell). When she fails to win a competitive grant to study abroad, she moves out on her own and begins her journey of self-discovery. The troll illustrations that eventually become the Moomins are introduced as mere doodles to help Tove unblock her more serious artistic impulses. It takes the encouragement of Vivica Bandler (Krista Kosonen), an upper-class theatre director with whom Tove falls deeply in love, to recognize their worth. Pöysti is engaging as the high-spirited Tove, infusing a fairly conventional biopic with energy and complexity. She is well supported by her fellow actors, particularly Kosonen. Linda Wassberg’s cinematography is warm and lush, befitting a story of creative and romantic passion. The costumes, art direction, and soundtrack laced with 1940s swing music evoke the exuberance of the post-WWII era and a certain go-for-broke attitude that Pöysti grows into. I particularly like a scene inside a lesbian club in Paris that is a riot of liberated women enjoying being themselves. TOVE offers a sumptuous and fully fleshed world that is a pleasure to visit. (2020, 103 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Also Screening/Streaming
Chicago International Film Festival Summer Screenings
Summer Screenings is a free weekly film series that celebrates sports and games from around the world. This week’s selection is Cédric Le Gallo and Maxime Govare’s 2019 French film THE SHINY SHRIMPS (105 min), featuring a conversation with directors Cédric Le Gallo and Maxime Govare moderated by Lee Shoquist on the streaming platform. More info here.
Facets Cinémathèque
Sahar Mosayebi’s 2019 Iranian film PLATFORM (87 min) is available to rent beginning this week. More info here.
Gene Siskel Film Center
Ursula Liang’s 2021 documentary DOWN A DARK STAIRWELL (83 min) and Lisa Immordino Vreeland’s 2021 documentary TRUMAN & TENNESSEE: AN INTIMATE CONVERSATION (81 min) are both available to rent beginning this week through August 12.
Óskar Páll Sveinsson’s 2020 Icelandic adventure documentary AGAINST THE CURRENT (87 min) and Max Basch and Malia Scharf’s 2020 documentary KENNY SCHARF: WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE (77 min), about the East Village artist, are available to rent through July 29.
Nancy Buirsk’s 2021 documentary A CRIME ON THE BAYOU (89 min) is available to rent through August 5.
Music Box Theatre
Thierry Demaiziere and Alban Teurlai’s 2019 French documentary LOURDES (92 min) is available to rent beginning this week.
Check the Music Box website for hold-over titles and the Music Box Garden Series line-up.
Video Data Bank
VDB presents the online series Protest (1970-2020), with work by Adrian Garcia Gomez, Linda Montano, Tony Cokes, Videofreex, and Sabine Gruffat, here.
🎞️ ADDITIONAL ONLINE SCREENINGS
Leigh Janiak’s FEAR STREET PART ONE: 1994 (US)
Available to stream through Netflix (subscription required)
As a kid who was frightened by the mere covers of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books, I certainly wasn’t brave enough to read the bloodier, teen-focused Fear Street series. As an adult who’s grown to love horror, I feel like I missed out. Lindsay Katai and Kelly Nugent’s excellent podcast Teen Creeps has allowed me a window into the world of YA pulp horror, and their revisiting of these books lends itself to both hilarious and heartbreaking revelations about girlhood in the 1990s. Leigh Janiak’s FEAR STREET PART ONE: 1994 transcends derivative nostalgia by leaning into its genre; like Teen Creeps, the film delivers pulpy fun while scrutinizing why these kinds of stories are so appealing in the first place. After the latest grisly mass murder in rundown Shadyside, heartbroken high schooler Deena (Kiana Madeira), her brother (Benjamin Flores Jr.), and friends (Olivia Scott Welch, Julia Rehwald, and Fred Hechinger) are forced to reckon with the town’s many buried evils. (The film is the first in a Netflix anthology series; the following two focus on events in Shadyside in 1978 and 1666.) This clearly draws on mid-90s slashers like SCREAM and such recent interpretations of the genre as IT FOLLOWS, but it manages not to feel stale—and in spite of a mall-set opening sequence starring Stranger Things’ own Maya Hawke. The film at times feels more aligned with Jennifer Reeder’s brandishing of nostalgia as a means of exploring the complex world of adolescence. This is due in large part to the treatment of its characters, which comes through in the film’s central queer romance and its consideration of socioeconomic issues in Shadyside. While the body count inevitably rises (and, in some cases, shockingly gorily), Janiak treats none of the teens as disposable high school archetypes. Also noteworthy is the impeccably curated mid-90s soundtrack, reinforced by a key subplot about a lovingly curated mixtape. (2021, 107 min) [Megan Fariello]
Zhou Shengwei’s S HE (China)
Available to stream through MUBI (Subscription required)
S HE creates a private world of symbolism: shoes, plants, eyes, keys. It’s not a subtle film; red high heels represent women, whose bodies are treated as objects to be manipulated or mutilated at will and used to breed babies (represented in the form of fruit). Born in a garden, one high-heeled shoe rebels by disguising herself as a male and working in a cigarette factory. She nurses and eventually engages in her need to rebel. But while the film has a narrative, that doesn’t register nearly as much as the flood of images brought to life in stop-motion animation. To pick another piece of experimental animation made around the same time, it’s as nightmarish as THE WOLF HOUSE. Some of Zhou’s influences are obvious, like Jan Svankmajer and Susan Pitt, but the film also refers to Salvador Dali’s paintings (clocks melt off the wall onto a factory floor) and even achieves industrial grit with spikes made of huge clumps of keys glued together. S HE seeks the unconscious without the barrier of words; although women’s moans and cries are incorporated into the soundtrack, it completely avoids spoken and written language. It was made from palpably real objects which Zhou animated into bizarre forms (he found most of them in the trash). But as odd as it is, S HE refers to genuine oppression and the urge to resist it. The veil of an allegory told with shoes allows S HE to suggest torture and sexual assault without being literal about them. It also might be the only way to critique factory toil without angering the mainland Chinese censors. (2018, 95 min.) [Steve Erickson]
The World of Gordon Parks: Early Short Films (US)
Available to stream for free from Anthology Film Archives here
Presented in collaboration with the Gordon Parks Foundation and Chicago Film Archives, this program provides a superb introduction to the life and career of multidisciplinary artist Gordon Parks, who came to prominence as a photojournalist, but went on to write books and direct film as well. Parks receives directorial credit on just one of the four works here—FLAVIO (1964, 11 min), an adaptation of a renowned photo-essay he contributed to Life magazine—yet the films hold together remarkably well, advancing a poetic, yet never glamorized vision of poverty and a heroic view of those who rise themselves out of it. FLAVIO centers on a boy of about 10 who lives in a favela outside of Rio de Janeiro with his mother, father, and seven siblings. Parks, who grew up in poverty himself, never evokes pity for his subject, but rather emphasizes the ability of children to adapt to their situation, no matter how dire it is, with imagination and resilience. The film is striking in its mix of moving and still images; the former bring a sense of vitality to the latter, which in turn have the effect of making you stop and internalize Flavio’s plight. Directed by Joseph Filipowic, DIARY OF A HARLEM FAMILY (1968, 20 min) takes a similar approach, incorporating still images that Parks shot for another Life Magazine profile into a cinematic documentary portrait. Parks also wrote the narration for HARLEM FAMILY, and the events he chooses to emphasize in the family’s life are despairing and sometimes harrowing. As an artist who understood poverty intimately, Parks looks past the obvious indignities of living in a ghetto to consider how poverty dehumanizes people on a psychological level. Not everyone born into poverty remains trapped in it, however, as THE WORLD OF PIRI THOMAS (1968, 60 min) gloriously attests. Parks directed portions of this public-television documentary about Thomas, a onetime gang leader, drug addict and convict who became a celebrated author and poet; one recognizes the director’s stamp in the impressionistic montages of Spanish Harlem, which alternate moments of squalor with moments of joy. Tying together the social portraiture and human-interest stories is Thomas’ electrifying presence, which reflects the resolve he brought to bettering himself. Concluding the program is LISTEN TO A STRANGER: AN INTERVIEW WITH GORDON PARKS (1973, 19 min), in which the artist reflects on his own path out of poverty and what he hopes to achieve through his photography and film. Parks emerges here as a sincere, self-aware individual motivated by the desire to contribute something of value to society. [Ben Sachs]
CINE-LIST: July 9 - July 15, 2021
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Steve Erickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Raphael Jose Martinez, Scott Pfeiffer