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.
PHYSICAL SCREENINGS
Screening at the Music Box Theatre this week: Katsuhiro Otomo's 1988 animated Japanese film AKIRA (124 min, DCP Digital; English-dubbed version), Seth Savoy’s 2020 film ECHO BOOMERS (94 min, DCP Digital), and Davy Rothbart’s 2019 documentary 17 BLOCKS (126 min, DCP Digital; followed by David Heilbroner and Kate Davis’ short documentary R.I.P. T-SHIRTS).
CHICAGO UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL
The Chicago Underground Film Festival continues virtually through November 22, with additional drive-in screenings on November 13. Full schedule and more information here.
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Chicago Shorts at the Drive-In – Program 2
ChiTown Movies – Friday, 6pm
A spirit of play abounds among the films in this eclectic showcase for local experimental film and video makers, perhaps nowhere more than in Emily Eddy and Natalie Chami’s AMOUR POUR UNE FEMME (2019, 9 min), which mines the ever-bountiful troves of the Chicago Film Archives for its images. Carried along by Chami’s impressionistic synthesizer soundtrack, Eddy’s sly montage sets apple-bobbing children, gyrating acrobats, and roughhousing smut models against a backdrop of deep geological forces. This contrast suggests that, where much found-footage work emphasizes the unrecoverable loss of the past, AMOUR POUR UNE FEMME instead finds an eternal vitalism in old films—an intervention Eddy casts in unmistakably feminist terms. Elsewhere, scenes of play tangle with darker themes of death, displacement, and obsolescence. Lori Felker’s I CAN’T (2019, 5 min) crystallizes this dynamic: amidst gleaming 16mm footage of her toddler cavorting, swinging, and blowing bubbles, the filmmaker inserts acerbic title cards invoking the departed filmmaker Robert Todd, for whom this imperfect roll was intended to be a tribute. Though the cinematography emulates Todd’s coruscating camera style, I CAN’T bears Felker’s unmistakable stamp, which is less grounded in the aesthetics of her images than in the mode of address—candid, colloquial, self-examining—those images construct. Felker’s work is well paired with Caitlin Ryan’s S P A C E L A N D (2020, 8 min), which also ponders how to generate meaning and value from scraps—in this case, the possessions left behind in storage lockers and auctioned off. Offering a puckish bricolage of wonky 16mm footage, digital effects, George Carlin bits, magic tricks, and a charmingly stiff reenactment of an auction scene, Ryan’s treatment of this theme is hardly solemn, but she nonetheless captures something creepily morgue-like about the pallid pallets of the Public Storage. More vibrant hues shoot through Natasha Nair’s IN THE WAKE (2020, 12 min), a documentary about a hand-woven textile workshop in Kerala, India. A particularly gifted colorist, Nair’s compositions also have a rare lucidity, which befits her clear-eyed appraisal of an industry threatened by new technology and shifting consumer demands. Irreversible change is also at the heart of Michele F. Ferris Dobles’ HIGH TIDE (2020, 30 min), which observes two girls coming of age in a small Costa Rican village threatened by rising waters. Dobles gamely follows her gamboling subjects into the muck and the mangroves, capturing moments of shared jubilation and uncertainty. Pegah Pasalar’s LOST IN HER HAIR (MONDAY) (2019, 6 min) similarly casts carefree youth against the anxieties of early adulthood by juxtaposing home video footage of the Iranian artist as a young girl getting dressed for school with contemporary footage, captured in the last hours before leaving her home country. Though marking the passage from childhood, Pasalar’s film proposes that, for experimental filmmakers, it’s never necessary to put away childish things. Also on the program: Diana Darby’s BABA SURA (2019, 7 min), Lonnie Edwards’s PERIPHERY (2019, 7 min), and Kurt Jolly’s GLITTER LAND (2020, 8 min), which were not available for preview. [Michael Metzger]
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Andrew J. Morgan and Nicholas Nummerdor’s SLEEZE LAKE: VANLIFE AT ITS LOWEST & BEST (US/Documentary)
ChiTown Movies – Friday, 8pm
Let me set the scene. It’s 2005. I have hair down to my shoulders and what I consider to be a pretty bitchin’ beard. I’m in a band that sounds a lot like Motorhead. I’m on break between lunch and dinner shifts at the restaurant I’m a chef at, and instead of going home for those two hours I decide to go on a burn cruise through the backwoods of southern Illinois with my coworker. In the middle of nowhere, stoned out of my mind, I set my eyes on the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in the world: a mint green, 1978 GMC Vandura. It’s sitting in a completely sketchy used car lot in a town with a population less than 2,000. It’s $700, as is. Done. And even though I might as well have piled that money on the ground and lit it on fire, because that van ended up abandoned on the side of the highway about nine months later, those nine van-filled months were glorious and I look back on them so fondly. Blasting Grand Funk and ordering pizzas to the van. Letting my teenage punk friend sleep in it on the weekends so he wouldn’t have to drive back home to his parent’s house drunk. Taking it on an ill-fated tour with my even more ill-fated punk band. There’s just something about a cool-ass van that makes you consider giving everything up and just committing to a weird, outsider van life—and SLEEZE LAKE documents a period of time in the Midwest that this was a real option. A time and place where van life was a true counter-cultural choice. Focusing on the Woodstock-type gathering of “vanners” on Memorial Day weekend 1977, where over 20,000 post-hippie, blue collar, true freaks gathered in a field around a pond to live it up for a raucous weekend, this film shows a forgotten piece of a truly American counterculture that was fleeting, yet forever changed the lives of all those involved. SLEEZE LAKE does a great job of balancing your standard talking heads reminiscing with great archival footage and ephemera, along with having a rockin’ modern soundtrack—which is imperative for a documentary about late-’70s, van-dwelling dirtbags. But most importantly this doc clocks at a perfect 60 minutes. You can tell the organizers, and attendees, of the Sleeze Lake event don’t need any more time to tell their story. These are some blue collar, Midwest folks that get straight to the point. The furthest the film strays from the re-telling of the gathering is to talk about how the van club that organized it, Midwest Vans LTD, is still going strong, with some members about to hit their 50-year anniversary in the club. But even this is without any kind of preciousness. As an armchair historian of oddball American subcultures, this film filled a blind-spot that I didn’t even know I had. And now I’m only filled with regret that I had to ditch my precious van all those years ago instead of joining up with these Chicagoland dirtballs and becoming a part of this wild, wild story. Crack a beer, crank the tunes, grab your partner, and catch this flick. (2020, 60 min) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
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Shorts Program 4
Available to rent Friday from 9 – 11pm here
Though they have little else in common, the two standouts in this generally above-average shorts program are both imaginative works that communicate feelings of paranoia. FOREIGN POWER (2019, 17 min) is an experimental narrative written, directed, and edited by Bingham Bryant, who co-directed the memorable low-budget feature FOR THE PLASMA in 2014. In this short, a young woman tells her friend about an elaborate dream she recently had, and part of the fun lies in never knowing if what you’re seeing reflects the women’s present-day interaction or the content of the one character’s dream. Bryant excels at creating cinematic analogues to dream logic; with nimble editing, he creates an unaccountably fluid progression between unrelated events, and his deadpan tone has the effect of normalizing strange behavior. The film contains poignant moments as well, such as when the woman’s friend explains in voiceover that the man we see in the dream had actually died a few years earlier. The overall feeling of FOREIGN POWER is one of entrapment—the film exudes a certain hermetic quality comparable to being stuck in someone’s mind. Roger Beebe’s AMAZONIA (2019, 24 min) meditates on another environment in which many of us feel trapped: the internet. This experimental documentary focuses on the ways in which our virtual economy, epitomized by Amazon, is changing the physical world. Beebe visits Amazon’s “fulfillment centers,” which is what the company calls the giant warehouses that store the innumerable products the company sells; he also looks at the corporate franchises that have been growing in former blue-collar American towns that have been economically rejuvenated by the presence of the fulfillment centers. AMAZONIA ends, soberingly, with a consideration of the environmental impact of e-commerce; suffice it to say, that impact is not good. Beebe presents film and video footage illustrating his monologue as windows on his desktop, a clever way of reminding us that we become part of the problems discussed whenever we surf the web. Walter Forsberg’s CELLULAR IMMUNE RESPONSE (2018, 5 min) and Gianluca Abbate’s SUPERMARKET (2018, 8 min) invoke different social ills through images of political demonstrators marching against any one of Donald Trump’s evils. Where the former builds on rapid montage, the latter is a marvel of superimposition; Abbate creates an impressive, moving collage combining waves of protestors, outsized foodstuffs, and more. Also in program are Zachary Epcar’s absurdist soap-opera spoof BILLY (2019, 8 min) and Annie Kielman and Joshua Patterson’s DECIDE, COMMIT, THRIVE (2019, 15 min), a peculiar fake infomercial for some kind of new-age meditation cult. [Ben Sachs]
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Shorts Program 5
Available to rent Saturday from 9 – 11pm here
With a range of works that explore oblique strategies of communication, this program might have taken its title from Tessa Hughes-Freeland’s SECRET MESSAGE - OTHER WISE (2019, 5 min), the brief and beguiling poem for film leader and Letraset that begins it. Some films here lean towards the cryptic, such as Lana Z. Caplan’s AUTOPOEISIS (2019, 8 min), which subliminally couches a flurry of meltdown-inducing hashtags (#SelfHypnosis #SunRa #SpaceIsThePlace #4ECognition #AssaultByHashtags #MeToo #BlackLivesMatter) behind rotoscoped Olympic aerialists, cosmic screen-savers, and optical illusions. I’d be tempted to classify AUTOPOEISIS as an inspired study in psychedelic randomness, but I can’t shake the sense of a hidden hypothesis: as social media and constant crisis untether us from the gravity of a shared reality, the line between mindfulness and hallucination erodes, making unwilling psychonauts of us all. Aaron Zegher’s MEMOIRS (2019, 10 mins), just as pleasantly inscrutable, is a distressed heirloom quilt of spoken recollections, family photos, and domestic scenes, accreted in hand-processed 16mm. The content of the memories rehearsed here seem less important than the form, which layers and scrambles these fragments of generational experience in order to resist their ossification. At times, I was reminded of the kinetic portrait films of Luke Fowler, which also resemble JULY 4TH, 1925, an unfussy super-8 elegy for the Italian Catholic activist Pier Giorgio Frassati, whose quoted meditations on death and mountaineering pair nicely with the Kevin Morby tune on the soundtrack. Death casts its shadow over two other films on the program: Lori Felker’s terrific I CAN’T (2019, 5 min) and Pablo Mazzolo’s GREEN ASH (2019. 10 min), a visually inventive landscape study of a mountain region in Argentina where, over 400 years ago, hundreds of Indigenous rebels jumped to their deaths to escape capture by the Spanish conquistadors. Mazzolo’s film feels disconnected from some of the more discursive films on the program, but provides a welcome reminder that, from Robert Beavers to Deborah Stratman, experimental filmmakers have long made camera technique a language of its own. Conversely, Noor Abed and Mark Lotfy’s ONE NIGHT STAND (2019, 24 min) is all about conversation: based around recordings made in a bar in Beirut during a chance encounter between the filmmakers and a would-be militia fighter on his way to join the YPG’s war against ISIS, the film subjects their dialogue to an almost forensic study. Through CGI renderings and reenactments performed by a wide range of actors, Abed and Lotfy expose the layers of performance and miscommunication at play in the fleeting exchange. As the film progresses, questions about geopolitics and war give way to matters of documentary fact and fiction; here, as in all of the films in this program, the medium is the message. Also on the program: Lonnie Edwards’s PERIPHERY (2019, 7 min), which was not available for preview. [Michael Metzger]
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Hisonni Mustafa's TAKE OUT GIRL (US)
Available to rent Saturday from 6:30 – 8:30pm here
On its face TAKE OUT GIRL appears to be the story of a child of an immigrant parent trying to do whatever they can to help the family, even if those things are less than legal. But what saves this film from being yet another story of a second-generation immigrant getting in over their head in this noble pursuit is the remarkably well-crafted script that weaves the story of Tera Wong, and her family, into an incredibly complicated tapestry of secrets and suspense. Tera is the daughter of a single mother who is literally breaking her back trying to keep their family’s Chinese restaurant afloat. Her brother is a low-level, go-nowhere drug dealer with violent tendencies, and her sister seems content to remain quietly resigned on the sidelines. Even though she drops out of school to help focus on saving the family business, it’s clear that Tera has more than enough street smarts to make up for the lack of any institutionally issued degree. Looking for an angle to help her family, and save her mother specifically, Tera realizes that her nondescript appearance and position as a restaurant delivery driver puts her in a perfect place to be a wildly successful delivery person for a local drug kingpin. After blustering her way into this position by sheer force of will, Tera starts stacking money in ways even she was not expecting. But when she moves the restaurant to a tony suburban area under the guise of receiving a minority-owned business grant, she learns that there is a lot more to her relationship with her drug boss than she ever expected. TAKE OUT GIRL is a story of secrets—the kind of secrets that people keep because they think they’re protecting others by doing so. But even the best intended secrets are mired in self-protection and deceit. TAKE OUT GIRL reminds us that behind every secret is a personal agenda. Some good, some bad, some dangerous. An incredible group of actors, from a large swath of ethnicities and races, forms a diverse cast that brings the kind of representation and authenticity to this story that intertwines the lives and experiences of working class, immigrant Los Angeles. TAKE OUT GIRL is a great palate cleanser for decades of that same old story. When most people use the phrase “strong female lead” to mean “character that could just as easily be a man, but happens to be a woman this time,” this film actually takes the time to create a fully formed, complicated, nuanced, female lead that is singular and wholly herself. This is an anti-hero’s journey of the kind usually relegated to white men of a certain age, not young Asian women—so thank god for this breath of fresh air. (2020, 98 min) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
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Shorts Program 7
Available to rent Sunday from 9 – 11pm here
With the brief narrative LAYING OUT (2019, 5 min), which opens this shorts program, Joanna Arnow (I HATE MYSELF :)) proves again that she’s one of the most provocative American filmmakers around. In just five minutes, Arnow confronts gender and racial prejudice, women’s feelings about domination and submission, and the ways women internalize the misogyny of the culture at large. LAYING OUT finds Arnow and an older Black woman discussing these discomforting subjects while sitting on the seashore in bikini tops and mermaid bottoms. Funny and weird, the film exhibits an exquisite sense of visual composition to boot. BANANAS GIRL (2020, 7 min), directed and edited by local filmmaker Shayna Connelly, impresses with its bold montage. Connelly cuts rapidly between shots of her young daughter Alisa saying or doing peculiar things (sometimes while wearing a banana costume), so that the short proceeds as a rush of non-sequiturs. One grasps the filmmaker’s deep love for her daughter, which borders on awe. This feeling of reverence carries over to the next short on the program, Natasha Nair’s experimental documentary IN THE WAKE (2020, 13 min), about a generations-old factory in India that produces hand-woven saris. Nair depicts the weavers’ work in fascinating detail, showcasing the skill that goes into the garments’ intricate, colorful patterns. The film is ultimately bittersweet, as Nair shifts focus halfway through to consider the economic hardships made by the factory owners and employees; the subjects admit that hand-weaving is both costlier and more time-consuming than making saris entirely with machines. One wonders if the film depicts the last days of their business. The program takes a turn for the bizarre with the next short, Tommy Becker’s EMOTIONS IN METAL (2019, 21 min), a musical ode to car culture. Through silly songs and passages of absurd physical comedy, Becker considers our relationships to our cars from multiple perspectives. The film trades in the head-scratching weirdness one comes to expect from CUFF; it’s got to be one of the most characteristic films in this year’s festival. Also screening: Stephanie Barber’s OH MY HOMELAND (2019, 4 min), Jenna Caravello’s O.T.O. REVISED (2018, 2 min), and Rachel Wolther’s GAMP (2019, 23 min). [Ben Sachs]
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Melody C. Miller’s RUTH WEISS, THE BEAT GODDESS (US/Documentary)
Available to rent Monday from 7 – 9pm here
Poet and artist ruth Weiss (who stylized her name in lowercase) passed away at 92 this past summer and director Melody C. Miller’s documentary RUTH WEISS, THE BEAT GODDESS is a fitting tribute, celebrating her art and life. The joyful and inspiring weiss, with bright blue-green hair and nails, is interviewed and featured throughout, narrating her own life as well as performing readings of her poetry. Born in 1928 to a Jewish family in Berlin, at ten years old weiss and her parents escaped the Nazism expanding across Europe, eventually settling in Chicago. As a young adult, she became a part of the Art Circle in Chicago, an artists’ commune where she first combined her poetry with jazz music. She eventually landed in San Francisco, innovating the blending of poetry and jazz further and organizing readings and performances. A contemporary of the most well-known Beat Generation poets, weiss’ innovation and influence was overshadowed by the men in the movement; RUTH WEISS, THE BEAT GODDESS pauses in the middle to recognize the myriad of women artists whose contributions remain largely unexamined. weiss continued to be a part of the San Francisco art scene long after the Beat period, participating in local film and theater, publishing her own books, supporting artists, and still performing. Interviews with weiss, who turned 90 in the course of filming, correspond with footage of her reading her poetry with jazz musicians accompanying; these poems are brought to life with images of nature, modern dance, and animation. RUTH WEISS, THE BEAT GODDESS both begins and ends with commanding readings from weiss herself and presents a vibrant homage to a fascinating and groundbreaking figure. Miller’s medley of visual and aural forms beautifully expresses the emotional power in ruth weiss’ words, and how her work was and still is intertwined with a larger community of artists. (2019, 68 min) [Megan Fariello]
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*Also included in this screening package is Dan Janos’ FLORA MY DEAR (2019, 8 min)
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Shorts Program 9
Available to rent Tuesday from 9 – 11pm here
I often find myself thinking about schools when watching experimental film programs. Sometimes, I’m wondering whether one filmmaker studied with another, as I did while watching Emilie Crewe’s APPALLING NATURE (2020, 9 min), a droll but disturbing storybook about human-animal encounters in the great outdoors. Replete with critters, bursts of animation, and heightened anxiety, I saw a connection to the work of Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby; turns Crewe graduated from the same college as her fellow Canucks, albeit a decade later. Perhaps there’s always been something psychotropic in the water at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University? Other times—admittedly, less charitably—I’m suspecting whether I’m watching a “thesis film,” as was indeed the case with Finnish filmmaker Joel Autio’s very serious, very earnest THE OTHER NIGHT (2019, 18 min). I can’t decide if it’s perverse to be thinking about educational attainment while watching CUFF shorts, or whether it’s naïve not to. “Underground film,” after all, is defiantly unprofessional; on the other hand, “experimental film” is often stridently professorial. The former is an ethos and an aesthetic, like punk; the latter is something like a discipline, like classics, or an applied science, like engineering or horticulture. Most experimental films hover somewhere between these poles. On the one hand, they make virtues of their well-researched premises, the artistic pedigree spelled out in acknowledgements and special thanks, or their specialized techniques, such as the superimpositions, solarizations, and hand-processed film artifacts of Brittany Gravely’s STORY OF THE DREAMING WATER (2018, 3 min). But experimental films also thrive on arcane principles of uselessness, rejecting the idea that films should be commodities, simple tools, or passive entertainments. We might measure a good experimental film by the extent to which it plays these two tendencies against one another; by that metric, Nicky Tavares’ SEARCHING FOR BEAUTY IN STUDENT LOAN DEBT OR AT LEAST THE ENVELOPES IN WHICH IT COMES (2020, 5 min) is the most perfect experimental film I’ve seen this year. Made by screen printing the safety patterns found on the inside of debt-letter envelopes directly onto 16mm film, the film evokes a sturdy tradition of cameraless and pattern-based films, from Len Lye to Jodie Mack, which it advances by playing cleverly with anaglyph 3D color schemes. But the soundtrack (composed of brooding electronic noises and bone-chilling voicemails from debt-servicing agencies) calls the entire economy of that tradition—and the overpriced masters programs which uphold it—brilliantly into question. Look at it through the blue lens, and you’ll see a masterful, exuberantly abstract dance of color and light; through the red lens, behold a bitter excoriation of the art school industrial complex and the systems of capitalist predation it enables. I wish Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner’s A DEMONSTRATION (2020, 25 min) was as aggressive in subverting its PhD bona fides. A sophisticated and formally dexterous discursion on biology, architectures of knowledge, and the hobgoblins of early Modern naturalism, A DEMONSTRATION wisely exploits the sensual pleasures of its trans-European locations. But in their Research Council-funded, world-striding sagesse, Litvintseva and Wagner never stray from a tone of cool conceptualism, even when they break out of their Baroque libraries to indulge in the sweaty ecstasy of a Berlin techno club or muse on billowing cloud formations. In “The Order of Things,” Michel Foucault noted that the tendency of 16th-century science “to accept magic and erudition on the same level,” something that should be true of experimental filmmakers as well; A DEMONSTRATION is perhaps more postgrad, less sorcery. Also on the program: Peter Coccoma and Anna Roberts-Gevalt’s JEANO (2019, 15 min), which was not available for preview. [Michael Metzger]
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Tommy Heffron's A WORDLESS THING (US)
Available to rent Tuesday from 7 – 9pm here
If you want to fully adhere to the spirit of the Chicago Underground Film Festival then check out this local no-budget strobing spangle of chaos and spectacle that lives somewhere between a variety show and a ghost story. Filmed at CAN-TV while writer/producer/editor/director Tommy Heffron was employed as the in-house trainer and tech for local cable access show producers, the movie was shot sporadically during off-hours using the tools and the talent at hand. Central to the film is Kenny Reed, a CUFF filmmaker alumnus himself, as a cheesily-dressed man at the end of his rope shambling uncomfortably around the TV studio after some unnamed family tragedy that he may or may not be responsible for. The film begins with off-kilter and comedic framings and edits that isolate and insult Reed. He's center stage, but even a grip with a ladder will take precedence and steal his moment. Reed re-launches his show as "A Rebellion of Human Garbage," which is a variety show featuring aggressive atonality, pretty and folksy singing and dancing, and ghosts that damn and condemn Reed for something we don't quite know. It's a dogged and misfit minor-key tale that perfectly nails the Chicago and the Underground parts of the festivities. (2019, 65 min) [Josh B. Mabe]
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Preceded by two shorts: Charles Dillon Ward's SQUASH STRETCH DECAY (2020, 2 min) and Michael Arcos' VALERIO'S DAY OUT (2019, 9 min).
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Robert C. Banks, Jr.’s PAPER SHADOWS (US/Experimental)
Available to rent Wednesday from 7 – 9pm here
Cleveland-based artist Robert C. Banks, Jr. (X: THE BABY CINEMA) explores identity and art in the experimental feature PAPER SHADOWS. Satirizing bureaucracy in the art world, the non-linear narrative examines the emotional and creative connection between an elderly Black man (James K. Ewing) and a young white female student artist (Kelly Imbragno) as they each traverse the Midwestern cityscape. These characters find themselves attempting to establish a sense of self in fantastical scenarios—including those involving a philanthropic organization, which is overseeing a fellowship grant through the use of mystical methods, and a lively 60s film-inspired espionage plot. Through image distortion and striking sound design, PAPER SHADOWS spotlights depictions of the creative process, performance through poetry and dance, and art education, juxtaposing these artistic activities with routine tasks like laundry and cleaning. As these images and sounds become gradually more dreamlike, they also increasingly provide opportunity for exploring multiple contrasted identities including age, gender, race, and class—these contrasts are visually accentuated through the stark use of 35mm black and white film. Banks worked with students from NewBridge Cleveland Center for Art and Technology’s after-school program on the filming and post-production for PAPER SHADOWS; this contextualization of the filmmaking process adds an introspective quality to the imagery, further emphasizing Banks’ themes of teaching and collaboration. (2019, 79 min) [Megan Fariello]
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Tirtza Even’s LAND MINE (US/Documentary)
Available to rent Thursday from 7 – 9pm here
LAND MINE moves so gracefully between personal essay and regional portrait that it’s difficult to pinpoint where one mode ends and the other begins. Director Tirtza Even introduces the film as a documentary about the Jerusalem apartment building where she grew up in the 1960s and 70s; as she delves into the lives of her neighbors from childhood and the building’s current residents, a partial history begins to take form of the conflict between Jewish settlers to Israel and the Palestinians they displaced. In a characteristic passage, Even presents an interview with her sister about being a child during the Six Days War of 1967, then cuts to onscreen text about how, after the war, the Israeli government created dozens of minefields in Palestinian territory that had been used previously for farmland. That isn’t the only atrocity Even considers in the film: Israel’s 1982 military aggression against Lebanon receives a fair amount of screen time, and one of the more powerful shots presents the aftermath of more recent Israeli bombing campaigns in Gaza. While national guilt is one of Even’s chief concerns, her interviewees barely address it, making it the structuring absence of most of the onscreen testimonies. (Fittingly the filmmaker has subtitled LAND MINE “The Other Side of Silence.”) What we hear is still plenty fascinating, as Even incorporates information about her literary scholar father; the Hebrew author Y. H. Brenner (whom Even’s father wrote about); and the composer Ido Shirom, who now resides in Even’s childhood home and who has written music inspired by national tragedies. The themes of coming-of-age and death intertwine when Even recounts how several men in her building died of unnatural causes over a period of several years in the 1970s—the building’s troubled history mirrors that of the region, and one comes away from the film with the feeling that one can’t talk about Israel without acknowledging some sense of loss. (2019, 85 min) [Ben Sachs]
BLACK HARVEST FILM FESTIVAL
The Gene Siskel Film Center continues with an online edition of the Black Harvest Film Festival through November 30. Information and full schedule at the Siskel website here.
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Marlon Johnson and Anne Flatté’s RIVER CITY DRUMBEAT (US/Documentary)
Available to rent from Friday through November 26 here
At one point in this illuminating and thoughtfully crafted documentary, River City Drum Corp. founder and executive director Ed “Nardie” White says, during a speech, “Black art matters.” The refrain is powerful—”Black lives matter” has become necessary shorthand in the struggle against the continued dehumanization of people of color, but here White extends the sentiment past the act of being let to live to consider the stuff of life that makes it worth living. Here that’s music—specifically African drumming, drum line, and mallet percussion—as well as educational opportunities around reading music, storytelling, and African-American history and culture. Founded in Louisville in 1991 by White and his wife, Zambia, the organization seeks to re-connect Black youth with their heritage in the hope of influencing their future. The film centers on White’s retirement as he plans to hand over the reins to Albert Shumake, a program alumnus poised to assume such responsibility as an adult with a family of his own. Directors Marlon Johnson and Anne Flatté harness the emotional power of White and Shumake’s trajectories to that of the program itself; ultimately this feels like a narrative film, as they seek to tell a story rather than convey information. One such facet of this technique is the spiritual presence of White’s beloved wife, who passed away in 2010, and his granddaughter, a victim of gun violence; viewers become invested in why White and his colleagues are doing what they’re doing, rather than just how. Similarly, scenes with Shumake and his young family and sequences featuring current participants—all young people who, like Shumake did, see RCDC as an outlet for their creativity and leadership potential—show the effects these kinds of programs can have. Sure, there are talking-head-style interviews and testimonials that resound with feel-good sentiment, but there’s a poignant emotionalism to it all, as it explores the connection of White, Shumake, and their students to the activity and thus their community. Footage of the kids playing music, whether at recitals or showcases, is invigorating; anyone who’s had the pleasure of watching a drum corp can attest to its ability to get you moving, even if you’re watching at home. (2019, 95 min) [Kathleen Sachs]
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Shorts Program: Tales from Other Shores
Available to rent from Friday through November 26 here
The importance of human connection is the overriding theme in this program of international shorts. In Pierre Le Gall and Sarah Malléon’s DOUBOUT (STAND UP) (France/Martinique, 2019, 19 min), 8-year-old Joseph (Rayan François-Eugène) must get adjusted to life without his beloved older brother (Jean-Philippe Rangassamy), who is leaving their island home to go to college in France. Joseph’s active imagination combined with the fanciful stories his grandfather tells him focus his anxiety on saving his home from a terrible monster. The performances are wonderful, and the lush jungle and otherworldly danger have a lovely whiff of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES (2010). As something of a response to DOUBOUT, Fabien Dao’s BABLINGA (France/Burkina Faso, 2019, 15 min) reverses the journey. Moktar (Cissé Maims) left Burkina Faso as a young man to make his fortune in France. He built a tavern, promising himself that he would return to his home country when the bar closed. Now it has, and the apparitions of the friends and family who attended his going-away party return as past blends into present. Maims and Stéphanie Koita as the girl he left behind give very affecting performances, and the film is filled with arresting images and well-conceived animation. In MAMA LOVA (France, 2019, 15 min), Adèle (Mata Gabin), an African immigrant to France, mourns the loss of her oldest son to drug-related violence. After being assaulted by the local drug lord (Daniel Joseph), she takes self-defense lessons at a local boxing club. The seeming trap of poverty and lack of opportunity are the real enemies, but Adèle is literally willing to fight for the better life for which she left Africa in director Jeff Taver’s angry condemnation of drugs, violence, and inequality. Tony Koros’ TITHES & OFFERINGS (Kenya, 2019, 16 min) is a strangely poignant comedy. A shady preacher (Joseph Gachanja) tutors himself on how to praise the Lord and ensure a full collection plate by paying a woman to pretend to be healed by him. He is in for the shock of his life when he comes face-to-face with genuine faith. Gachanja, an ebullient protagonist in a bright red suit, cuts a disarmingly sympathetic character despite his would-be hucksterism. Nelson Foix’s TIMOUN AW (YOUR KID) (Guadeloupe, 2020, 26 min) pits hardened drug dealer Chris (Sloan Descombes) against an extremely cute baby who is left on his doorstep. The film contains no surprises, but it manages to move us anyway as Chris evades some criminals who are out to get him while trying to take on his new responsibility. [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Shorts Program: Women of Color
Available to rent from Saturday through November 27 here
Themes of generational ties, loss, and transition connect the six shorts of this program, all featuring Black women protagonists as they persevere through life’s challenges. Four of the films are narratively and visually straightforward, heartfelt stories. This is especially true of the longest film in the program, Lynn Dow’s COMPASSIONATE RELEASE (2019, 23 min), which follows a widowed mother (Stephanie Pope) and her college-aged twin daughters (Sasha Boykin and Sable Boykin) as they face a number of hardships. Kameishia D. Wooten’s charming DESTINY’S ROAD (2019, 16 min), takes place on high school graduation day, but the celebration is marred for honor-student Destiny (Mariah Robinson) by the realization her college tuition money has been stolen. In Shawn Pipkin’s MO (2020, 17 min) a struggling single mother (Maria Katre-Osler, giving an earnest performance), who dreams of playing the trumpet for a living, takes a job teaching English as a second language. Derek Dow’s COPING (2020, 16 min) experiments with the melodrama genre in this Black Mirror-adjacent sci-fi musing on coping with grief and moving forward. Starring another musician protagonist, it’s been two years since Harmony (Reece Raechelle) lost her sister Cadence (Reece Ford), and she’s still devastated by her passing. At the suggestion of her therapist, she participates in a new virtual reality-based treatment in an attempt to move forward. Though they thematically connect, these final two films are visually and narratively distinctive. Stuart Napier’s skillfully crafted and affecting CARNIVAL (2019, 10 min) follows an absentee mother (Nadia Williams) as she takes her young daughter (Haniya Lampkin-Berry) to a colorful street carnival in Bristol. Their fun day out is thwarted by the appearance of someone from the mother’s past, shedding light on the complicated family dynamic. Lastly, the shortest film of the group is also the program’s boldest standout; impressively shot, with a Western-inspired look, Tari Wariebi’s LEAVE US HERE (2020, 6 min) joins a woman (Lauren E. Banks) and her grandmother (Starletta DuPois) at a gas station, though their roadside pitstop is not exactly what it seems. Neither speaks for the duration of the film, making their performances completely captivating as they convey so much about their dynamic with their physicality and expressions. It’s a thoroughly impressive visual punch of a short. [Megan Fariello]
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Zeshawn Ali's TWO GODS (US)
Available to rent from Sunday through November 29 here
Early in Zeshawn Ali’s finely-wrought documentary TWO GODS, we find middle-aged mortician Hanif energetically sanding down caskets in his workshop. Bouncing and head-nodding to the hip-hop station, Hanif pauses to declare his pride and dedication for his work, before throwing himself back into it. Through true craftsmanship, the moment tells us, the smallest tasks reflect our value to the world, and our care for those in it—or, for the casket-maker, for those who have just left it. It’s the qualities of craft and care that make TWO GODS, an ostensibly modest film about Black life and community in East Orange, New Jersey, feel vast and timeless. Ali shoots in black and white, and begins his film with a scene of burial rites; both decisions suggest that lives we are about to encounter are lived in the shadow of death. Hanif, the film’s primary subject, has seen his fair share of it. As we learn, Hanif found his profession after years of addiction and incarceration, hardships we glean from his eyes and his voice as much as from his words. An observant Muslim, Hanif is committed to keeping on a righteous path, to healing his strained relationship with his adult son, and to offering friendship and guidance to two at-risk neighborhood kids. For Furquan, a precocious and sweetly mischievous 12-year-old, Hanif’s workshop provides a place to learn, and a safe harbor from violence and neglect at home; to Naz, a reflective teenager struggling to break free from the cycle of incarceration and police harassment, Hanif extends both compassion and admonition. Ali and editor Colin Nusbaum render the diverging paths of these men’s lives elliptically, with detailed attention to everyday textures of environment and habit. When moments of crisis arise, Ali’s camera responds with poetic compositions, further binding the film’s artisanship to the care it evinces for its protagonists. Even as fate widens the distance separating Hanif from Naz and Furquan, TWO GODS works effectively (if a touch too forcefully, perhaps) to underscore the emotional arc of loss and redemption that they share. Though overcast by grief and hardship, TWO GODS is, in the last, an affirmative, even a reverential experience, and a reminder that cinema only generates true empathy when we know its tools are in skillful hands. (2020, 82 min) [Michael Metzger]
LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – New Reviews
Manoel de Oliveira’s FRANCISCA (Portugal)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
At various points in FRANCISCA, the actors break the fourth wall to stop whatever they’re doing and look directly at the camera. It’s an audacious gesture, and only in part because it disrupts the film’s narrative flow. FRANCISCA takes place in the mid 19th century, and, for the most part, Manoel de Oliveira doesn’t let you forget it—the film advances a deliberately antiquated aesthetic, with declamatory line readings, tableau-like imagery, and extended passages where title cards summarize offscreen dramatic action. Such devices can feel alienating at first, but they have a way of luring you into the past setting. Oliveira doesn’t want to re-create the look of the 19th century, but rather invoke how people comprehended the world then. It’s significant that the film spends so much time on people writing and reading letters; Oliveira wants us to understand how the ubiquity of written expression shaped relationships and perceptions at this point in history. The director’s authoritative sense of the past informs everything about FRANCISCA, even those moments when the actors break the fourth wall. In Oliveira’s hands, the actors’ gazes into the camera suggest the 19th century looking out at us in the present. This experience is rare in cinema, as most historical films dramatize the present looking at the past, yet it defines almost all of Oliveira’s work. To watch a film like FRANCISCA is to stand in dialogue with history, not passively absorb it. The movie recounts a tragedy in the life of author Camilo Castelo Branco (whose novel Doomed Love provided the source material for another Oliveira film), when his friend José Augusto seduced and married a woman Branco had loved, the titular Francisca. For Oliveira, the relationships between these three characters reflect 19th-century (and historically Portuguese) notions of honor, passion, and domination; the film, in its grand provocation, asks us just how distant we feel from the values on display. (1981, 167 min) [Ben Sachs]
Joyce Chopra’s SMOOTH TALK (US)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
Winner of the 1986 Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Dramatic Film, SMOOTH TALK stars Laura Dern as Connie, a fifteen-year-old exploring her sexuality, navigating the carefree life of a teenager obsessed with boys and the terror of unwanted sexual attention. Spending the summer before her sophomore year with her friends at the beach and the mall, Connie avoids helping her parents (Mary Kay Place and Levon Helm) and is constantly negatively compared to her more obliging older sister (Elizabeth Berridge). Connie spends nights out flirting with boys, but things get dark when it becomes clear she’s being stalked by an older man (Treat Williams). Director Joyce Chopra deftly balances SMOOTH TALK’s pastel-colored 80s coming-of-age story as it teeters into horror. Williams is so completely menacing that his first quick appearance on screen—watching Connie from afar—creates a distinct shift in the film. His physicality, especially in a scene where he moves further from his parked car towards Connie alone in her house, using the titular “smooth talk” to disarm her from outside the screen door, presents an anxiety-inducing amount of threat. The dread is very much grounded in reality, however, and the film never feels exploitive or critical of Connie. Rather, SMOOTH TALK takes seriously the distinction between Connie innocently exploring her own desires and someone else aggressively forcing his upon her; it’s an overall powerful take on the coming-of-age film. Dern expresses so clearly the fluctuating excitement and unease of a teenager pushing boundaries, and her chemistry with Place conveys a convincingly fraught, yet loving, relationship between concerned mother and teenage daughter. Also noteworthy is the way the film places an everyday importance on music for Connie and those around her—James Taylor acted as music director on the film. (1985, 92 min) [Megan Fariello]
LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Held Over/Still Screening/Return Engagements (Selected)
Abderrahmane Sissako's BAMAKO (Mali)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
Similar to the work of Ousmane Sembène, Abderrahmane Sissako's BAMAKO is an audacious piece of political filmmaking that imagines a trial in which the plaintiff, African society, has charged the defendant, international financial institutions such as World Bank and the IMF, with the crimes of neocolonialism and the unjust exploitation of African peoples. Shot almost entirely in Sissako's childhood courtyard, the film is an intriguing blend of fiction and documentary. On the one hand, the scenario couldn't be more fantastical, however, the film features real Malian denizens voicing their outcries as well as professional lawyers who approach the proceedings as if they were part of an actual court case. As the trial progresses, the hum of everyday existence continues in the periphery: a marriage disintegrates, women dye cloth, a wedding takes place. This attention to marginalia has a humanizing effect, reminding the viewer that amidst all the weighty political rhetoric, individual lives carry on. One of BAMAKO's most surreal moments is a mini-film parody of the western genre titled "Death in Timbuktu" starring Danny Glover (one of the film's producers), which satirizes the dispensability of African life and the omnipresence of American influence. When the trial reaches its crescendo, Brechtian detachment gives way to an impassioned indictment of global capitalism and a vociferous demand for a guilty verdict. Despite being released in 2006, BAMAKO has a fresh, contemporary relevance for American viewers in the wake of the Occupy movements, which signaled an unprecedented First World disillusionment with major financial institutions. (2006, 115 min) [Harrison Sherrod]
Frederick Wiseman’s CITY HALL (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
Frederick Wiseman has always said he makes movies about institutions, but his thematic focus is much broader than that. His films are about how institutions reflect larger social structures, what values seem to guide them, and whether they uphold our collective hopes for civilization. Wiseman’s concerns lend themselves to considerations of the zeitgeist, and indeed, many of his films capture the spirit of their times in which they were made. LAW AND ORDER (1969), which features a cameo from Richard Nixon himself, speaks to America’s reactionary response to the events of 1968; ASPEN (1991), which presents a divided city of materialistic elites and blue-collar have-nots, may be the ultimate film about the Reagan-Bush era; and the multicultural panorama IN JACKSON HEIGHTS (2015) gives dramatic form to the promise of the Obama years. Now, Wiseman gives us his Trump film, CITY HALL. Characteristically coy, it features nary a conservative onscreen; even Trump’s rhetoric gets acknowledged only indirectly. Yet the movie profoundly considers Donald Trump’s poisonous impact on American culture, from his attacks on immigrants to his heartless disregard for people in need. “We don’t have leadership coming from Washington right now,” says Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh in one of the many committee meetings we see him attend in the film, and much of CITY HALL presents a community taking steps to lead itself and set a positive example for the nation. The most memorable scenes tend to present discussions among the diverse staff of the institution, with everyone making an effort to listen to people unlike themselves and confront difficult truths. A common question emerges from these encounters: How do we make our society more equitable for historically under-represented groups such as women, immigrants, ethnic minorities, disabled veterans, and the poor? In other words, how do we empower the people Trump is encouraging Americans to hate? Perhaps we can start by electing more leaders like Walsh, who honor civic responsibility and the people they’re working for. CITY HALL is one of the few Wiseman films centered on an individual person; we see Walsh all around the title location and all over the city at large, attending charity events, meeting with Latinx youth, and lecturing at a senior center about how to avoid scam artists. In one of the film’s emotional highlights, Walsh opens up to a gathering of war veterans about his decades in recovery for alcoholism, noting he knows what it’s like to need to ask for help with your problems. The Mayor isn’t especially charismatic or eloquent, but his effort to locate common experience with others is touching. CITY HALL sustains this uplifting tone for most of its running time, which makes the tonal outliers seem all the more unsettling. One sequence that appears late in the film finds an agent from city pest control stopping by the house of a sickly, 70-ish divorcé who unexpectedly starts lamenting his life’s misfortunes. The man delivers the sort of colloquial aria one finds all over Wiseman’s films, but its inclusion is mysterious. Maybe it’s another reminder that, for all the optimism on display, there are some very big rats lurking just outside our view. (2020, 275 min) [Ben Sachs]
Tyler Taormina’s HAM ON RYE (US)
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here
HAM ON RYE, a suburban coming-of-age comedy-drama with a large ensemble cast, boldly stands out from the crowded landscape of recent American indies for its genuine narrative weirdness and singular aesthetic ambition. What seemingly begins as an end-of-high-school nostalgia trip, in the vein of AMERICAN GRAFFITI and DAZED IN CONFUSED, soon gives way to something far darker and more subversive: The movie's first half features deft cross-cutting between short, clever scenes in which dozens of teenage characters are getting dressed and prepping for a big, prom-like event, an annual rite-of-passage where kids in late adolescence are expected to congregate at a popular local delicatessen in the unnamed town where the film is set, and ultimately pair off into couples for a celebratory dance. But, as in the early work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, HAM ON RYE proves to be something of a narrative shapeshifter—the warmth and humor of the early daylight scenes are soon displaced by a second half imbued with a potent, Hopper-esque sense of nocturnal melancholy. Most of the characters from the first half disappear at the dusky half-way mark—some quite literally into thin air—only to be replaced by a new cast of more disaffected-seeming young adults. One character, Haley (Haley Bodell), who pointedly flees from the deli before the dance begins, bridges the film's two halves but it is unclear how much time elapses in between; the second half could either be taking place the same night as the first half or a couple of years later, an ambiguity that lends the movie much of its haunting and dreamlike power. What does it all mean? I think that Taormina, a first-time feature filmmaker but hardcore cinephile who is also a talented musician, intends for the narrative to function as a kind of complex metaphor for the notion of "growing up" in general and, more specifically, the way some people leave their hometowns in an attempt to fulfill ambitious destinies while others choose to sadly remain behind. But see it and decide for yourself: independent American cinema of this uncommonly poetic caliber deserves to be seen and discussed far and wide. (2019, 85 min) [Michael Glover Smith]
William Greaves’ NATIONTIME (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here
At a time when Black Lives Matter has become a vital rallying cry for change the world over, William Greaves’ NATIONTIME (sometimes listed as NATIONTIME—GARY) asserts that Black lives are also a source of political and social change. The film documents the National Black Political Convention of 1972, when Black Americans of all walks of life convened in Gary, Indiana, to draft a platform of national unity. There are no scenes of the break-out sessions that led to the actual drafting; rather, Greaves focuses on the speeches delivered to the Convention as a whole. The opening remarks, delivered by Rev. Jesse Jackson, comprise the film’s longest and most electric sequence, as Jackson stresses the need for Black unity and a proportionally accurate representation of Black people in U.S. government and public offices. (Other prominent speakers include Dick Gregory and Imamu Amiri Baraka.) Best known today for the experimental feature SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM: TAKE ONE (1968), Greaves matches Jackson’s excitement with such cinematic techniques as dynamic editing, sudden zooms, and immersive handheld camerawork. NATIONTIME exudes energy from the opening moments, apropos to the historic breakthrough of the Convention; but more importantly, it conveys the immense potential that Black political groups possess, whether through voting or direct social action. Haunting the Convention are the shocking tragedies of the 1960s (Coretta Scott King and Betty Shabazz, widows of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, respectively, are both key speakers), and the film suggests that the call for Black political unity in the early 1970s grew, in part, out of a sense of dissolution following the murders and arrests of too many prominent Black leaders. The Convention didn’t produce a viable platform, since the delegations could not agree on all parts of the document, yet NATIONTIME doesn’t end in a sense of failure. Indeed, a spirit of triumph prevails. Perhaps the Convention’s failure to reach consensus after a few days speaks to the remarkable richness and diversity within the Black American community, which is something worth celebrating. (1972, 80 min) [Ben Sachs]
Jia Zhang-Ke's STILL LIFE (China)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
The people of Fengjie scramble to salvage what they can as their surroundings are submerged by water displaced by the Three Gorges Dam; there're the sensations of walking across rubble, of soup-steam getting in your face, of cheap labor and unheated rooms. STILL LIFE is a poem and a survey by director Jia Zhang-Ke, his actors, cinematographer Yu Lik Wai, the 21st century, digital video, and China's landscapes. (Social landscapes as well as geographic ones / the architecture of interactions as much the architecture of bridges and the building-ghosts of razed cities / great spans of distance across gorges and between people seated side by side.) It is tactile, aromatic, romantic, simple and final. A document of China's break-neck growth that tells us more about the present than most films that would call themselves documentaries. It's a lunar expedition to a familiar place: a Neo-(Sur)Realist film written by world economics like Jia's THE WORLD and UNKNOWN PLEASURES, and a (modern) history lesson like his debut PLATFORM. The film has more in common with a photograph than the painting its title suggests, capturing an instant in a rapidly changing world. It stresses the passage of time to express a feeling for life. A focus on time brings a focus to life. (2006, 108 min) [Kalvin Henley/Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]
LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Also Screening/Streaming
Chicago International Children’s Film Festival
Facets presents the Chicago International Film Festival as a virtual fest from November 13-22. More info and full schedule here.
Lake County Film Festival
The Lake County Film Festival continues through November 16 with a mixture of virtual and physical screenings of features and shorts. Full schedule and more info here.
Gallery 400
Shelly Bahl's 2019 video WE KNOW WHAT IS AND IS NOT (3 min) is online until November 22 here.
Mostra Brazilian Film Festival Chicago
Mostra moves online this year, with screenings through November 14. Full schedule and more info here.
Renaissance Society (UofC)
The Renaissance Society presents two videos online in conjunction with their current show Nine Lives. Streaming here through November 15 are: Marwa Arsanios’ 2014 video HAVE YOU EVER KILLED A BEAR? OR BECOMING JAMILA (26 min) and Tamar Guimarães’ 2018 video O ENSAIO [THE REHEARSAL] (51 min).
Facets Cinémathèque
Miles Joris-Peyrafitte’s 2019 film DREAMLAND (98 min) and Mike Nell’s 2020 film BLINDFIRE (83 min) are available for streaming beginning this week. Check the Facets website for hold-over titles.
Gene Siskel Film Center
Gabriel Mascaro’s 2019 Brazilian/Uruguayan film DIVINE LOVE (101 min) is available for streaming beginning this week. Check the Siskel website for hold-over titles.
Music Box Theatre
Hong Khaou’s 2020 UK film MONSOON (85 min) is available for streaming beginning this week. Check the Music Box website for hold-over titles.
ADDITIONAL ONLINE SCREENINGS
Anthony Drazan’s IMAGINARY CRIMES (US)
Streaming for free on Tubi and Amazon Prime Video (with subscription), and also available to rent through Google Play, Vudu and YouTube
Ray Weiler (Harvey Keitel), the Oregon father at the center of Anthony Drazan’s mid-twentieth-century period piece, scrounges together a living by peddling a rotating array of questionable investment opportunities to the folks in his milieu—the corner-store cashier, a bank vice president he meets through his daughter’s classmate. Ray’s pontifications on the mining industry and the American dream sometimes edge into the third person (“Ray Weiler never welches on a promise”), as if he conceives of himself less as an individual than an embodiment of a deluded kind of patriotic, can-do optimism. But Drazan’s admirably restrained drama (adapted from Sheila Ballantyne’s autobiographical novel) captivates not as an instruction-manual-like peek at the craft of a small-time con man but as a sensitive window into the turbulence of single parenthood. A widower of eight years when the movie opens—his late wife Valery (Kelly Lynch) surfaces in flashbacks as a solitaire-loving cinephile—Ray juggles his many precarious business prospects with the demands of raising two children. Though it jumps around in time due to a wistful framing voice-over from Ray’s eldest daughter Sonya (Fairuza Balk), IMAGINARY CRIMES overflows with patiently etched scenes that are concerned with nothing more than getting through the day at hand—Ray waking up the girls, cooking them dinner, or offering impromptu (if misguided) advice on their homework. Sonya, a teenager who in the eyes of her English teacher (Vincent D'Onofrio) displays tremendous promise as a writer, is mature and savvy enough to see through her dad’s far-fetched bravado, while the impressionable, years-younger Greta (Elisabeth Moss) is cheerfully swept away by Ray’s sense of adventure. Though he occasionally lets Stephen Endelman’s score overarticulate these emotional stakes, Drazan relays the Weilers’ household strife with psychological clarity and a convincing selection of devastating behavioral details. Early on, Ray successfully sweet-talks the headmistress (Diane Baker) at his wife’s alma mater into admitting Sonya under special circumstances, but the scene doesn’t conclude on that note of triumph. Ray is asked to supply a tuition deposit—a request he immediately defers, under Sonya’s gaze, with an on-the-spot, ingeniously delivered lie about a misplaced checkbook. (1994, 105 min) [Danny King]
Jérémy Clapin’s SKHIZEIN (France/Short)
Streams for free on Vimeo
To be “beside oneself” is a term that usually refers to someone experiencing something very emotionally charged. Of course, the part of that phrase that most people don’t think much about is that the emotion literally drives one out of one’s body. If you’ve ever witnessed a car wreck or been threatened with serious physical harm, as I have, you know viscerally that it is possible for your mind to disconnect and float away from your body. French animator Jérémy Clapin took his experience of being in an earthquake, as well as some odd perspectives in some drawings he was rendering, and conceived the story of a man whose encounter with a 150-ton meteorite crashing toward him sends him exactly 91 centimeters beside himself. “Skhizein,” from the Greek for “split,” is the root for the word “schizophrenia.” Whether you think Clapin’s protagonist Henri (Julien Boisselier) has literally been cleaved from his body by a quasi-supernatural event or has had a mental health crisis may depend on whether you are a fan of The Twilight Zone. The muted animation, moody music, and flat affect of Henri make SKHIZEIN a disturbing piece that is open to various interpretations, and Clapin is more than happy to confuse the issue. The film starts with Henri visiting a psychiatrist (Théo Grimmeisen). Although his body is hovering in the air, he is at exactly the height he would be if he were laying on the examination couch. The nonchalance of the psychiatrist indicates that he sees Henri’s body right where it should be. The dissonance between what we see and must imagine, what we believe could have happened, and the boundary-free world of animation creates tension in the viewer. Like a proper audience, we want to believe the person Clapin has set us up to identify with, and the director’s meticulous creation of Henri’s altered world—one in which he is able to calculate and diagram in chalk precisely where he must put his hand to flush the toilet or pick up the phone—lends logic and veracity to Henri’s predicament despite its patent absurdity. When Henri realizes that the psychiatrist is of no use to him, he takes matters into his own hands. When his television goes snowy with static as it did the first time the meteorite approached, he looks out the window and spies it again. His visually odd pursuit of it is an elegantly crafted chase sequence. At land’s end, we see the outline of Mont St. Michel, a mountainous island periodically cleaved from France when the tide washes over a land bridge—an aptly chosen landscape detail. Henri plants himself on the sandy beach, quickly calculates where he must be for the meteorite to strike him again, and holds his arms wide. The animation—a combination of traditional drawings by Clapin and models rendered by Jean-François Sarazin, Loli Irala, and Raphael Bot-Gartner—is both quirky and quite poignant. The sound design by Marc Piera is almost hyperrealistic; I recommend viewing this short film with a good pair of headphones for maximum effect. (2008, 14 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
SUPPORT LOCAL THEATERS AND SERIES
As we wait for conditions to improve to allow theaters to reopen, consider various ways that you can help support independent film exhibitors in Chicago weather this difficult time. Memberships, gift cards, and/or merchandise are available from the Gene Siskel Film Center, the Music Box Theatre, and Facets. Donations can be made to non-profit venues and organizations like Chicago Filmmakers, the Chicago Film Society, South Side Projections, and many of the film festivals. Online streaming partnerships with distributors are making films available through the Gene Siskel Film Center, the Music Box Theatre, and Facets; and Facets also has a subscription-based streaming service, FacetsEdge, that includes many exclusive titles.
COVID-19 UPDATES
Most independent, alternative, arthouse, grassroots, DIY, and university-based venues and several festivals continue to have suspended operations, are closed, or have cancelled/postponed events until further notice. Below is the most recent information we have, which we will update as new information becomes available.
Note that venues/series marked with an asterisk (*) are currently presenting or plan to do regular or occasional “virtual” online screenings.
OPEN:
Music Box Theatre – The Music Box has reopened in a limited capacity, presenting physical, in-theater screenings and also continues to present online-only screenings*
CLOSED/POSTPONED/HIATUS:
Beverly Arts Center – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) – Closed until furtuer notice (see above for “virtual” online screenings)*
Chicago Film Society – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice
Chicago Filmmakers – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice*
Comfort Film (at Comfort Station) – Programming cancelled until further notice
Conversations at the Edge (at the Gene Siskel Film Center) – Will be presenting online discussions and screenings in October*
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Screenings cancelled until further notice
Facets Cinémathèque – Closed until further notice (see above for “virtual” online screenings)*
Film Studies Center (University of Chicago) – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice*
filmfront – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice
Gallery 400 (UIC) *
Gene Siskel Film Center – Closed until further notice (see above for “virtual” online screenings)*
The Nightingale – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice
The Park Ridge Classic Film Series (at the Park Ridge Public Library) – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice
FESTIVALS:
Postponed with no announced plans yet:
The Cinepocalypse film festival (June) – Postponed with plans to reschedule at a future time
The Windy City Horrorama festival (April 24 - 26) – Cancelled; will possibly be rescheduled or reconfigured at a future date
The Chicago Critics Film Festival (May 1 - 7) – Postponed until further notice
CINE-LIST: November 13 - November 19, 2020
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Kalvin Henley, Danny King, Josh B. Mabe, Raphael Jose Martinez, Michael Metzger, Harrison Sherrod, Michael Glover Smith, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky