📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING
A String of Pearls: The Films of Camille Billops & James Hatch
Gene Siskel Film Center – See showtimes below
Camille Billops and James Hatch’s SUZANNE, SUZANNE and FINDING CHRISTA (US/Documentary)
Saturday, 3pm
Documentarians have long turned the camera on themselves, but it is rare to see the kind of unblinking honesty that the husband-and-wife team of visual artist Camille Billops and theater producer and professor James Hatch brought to their films. The subject of the first two of their three examinations of the Billopses and their extended family, SUZANNE, SUZANNE (1982, 26 min, DCP Digital) and FINDING CHRISTA (1991, 55 min, DCP Digital), deal with the disturbing topics of domestic violence and child abandonment, respectively. Suzanne Browning, the subject of the first film, is Billops’ niece, a recovering heroin addict, and the oldest daughter of her large nuclear family. Using home movies, still photos, and interviews, Billops and Hatch help Suzanne unravel the mysteries that most torment her—why “Brownie,” her father, singled her out for beatings, whether or not he loved her, and why her mother did not protect her from him. Over the short span of the film, we learn a lot about the family’s dynamics as they saw them, and cringe at the description of “Death Row,” the room where Brownie would take Suzanne to beat her. The final scene, theatrically staged with Suzanne and her mother facing forward against a black background, provides an emotional catharsis for both women and a reckoning with the past. In FINDING CHRISTA, Billops faces her long-ago decision to give her 4-year-old daughter Christa up for adoption. Billops seems matter-of-fact about it, reasoning that with Christa’s father out of the picture, it would be better to give her daughter a chance at a normal family life. The other reasons for her decision, however, seem far from self-sacrificing; indeed, Billops sees them as feminist. We meet a vast array of Billops’ relatives—more than I could keep straight—and get a taste of familial life and attitudes in the Black community of the 20th century. The film builds its story with a surprising amount of suspense, and climaxes when Billops agrees to meet Christa, now a grown woman and singer. An experimental element intrudes as theater director George C. Wolfe, a friend of the filmmakers, stages several vignettes of the reunion of mother and daughter. The film ends with a happy Christa, a smiling, somewhat rueful Billops, and Hatch waving a sparkler welcoming Christa back to the family. It is sad to note that this seemingly happy ending would not last. Billops later rejected Christa, and Christa, refusing life-giving surgery for the bad heart she seems to have inherited from the Billops side of the family, died at the age of 59 in 2016. Followed by a discussion with Natalie Bullock-Brown, teaching assistant professor at North Carolina State University, documentary filmmaker, and founding member of the Documentary Accountability Working Group. [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Camille Billops and James Hatch's A STRING OF PEARLS and OLDER WOMEN AND LOVE (US/Documentary)
Saturday, 6pm
Camille Billops and James Hatch created a small but potent body of documentaries that were all strengthened by their personal investment in the material. The third in the couple’s trilogy of family films, A STRING OF PEARLS (2002, 57 min, DCP Digital) is an especially deep familial dive, with nearly all of its many subjects being blood relatives of Billops. With interviews covering four generations, each person reflects on the family’s men’s typically early deaths and how these events shaped their lives. The men get a strong focus as a result, with the film’s strongest material involving them fretting over their own paths as fathers without strong role models. The film is based around these structuring absences: the present men facing their own mortality and their borrowed-time mentality from having made it this far. PEARLS’ two non-family subjects are poet Afaa Weaver and an offscreen ER doctor describing his experience treating gunshot victims in LA. It’s almost polar opposite material; Weaver brings a low, soothing lyricism, while the doctor’s interjections offer nothing but blunt horror. This stretches the film in two directions, aspirations and actualities in sharper contrast as we see how inter-generational optimism curdles. It’s one of the many distinct touches Billops and Hatch bring to their material, where even their most formal interviews have a loose honesty brought on by Billops’ frequent onscreen appearances and obvious comfort with the interviewees (even to the point of knowingly provoking them, like when she asks each man his opinion on abortion). It’s her uncanny social ability that connects the aesthetics of home movies and discursive social documentaries, layering the best qualities of both. This loose quality is furthered in the comparatively breezy but no less revelatory OLDER WOMEN AND LOVE (1987, 27 min, DCP Digital), where the couple turns their camera on middle-aged and elderly women to talk about sex and relationships. The subjects are mostly interested in busting taboos around age-gap relationships, with almost all of them expressing an interest in young men. One subject notes that she loves a “taught” physicality, and that no men in her age group have that quality, thus she’s mostly interested in men in their 20’s. A viewer can see quickly how a gender-swapped version of the same reflection would elicit cringes, but this is part of the quiet radicalism of this and other work by Billops/Hatch: they unobtrusively take this desire at face value to create a piece that builds, despite its slightness, into a poignant portrait of aging and changing (and unchanging) desires. As a program and as a series, the films of Billops and Hatch are among the best in American documentary, reveling in the joy of depicting its vital subjects, their dreams and realities in equal measure. Followed by a discussion with Naeema Torres, Interim Executive Director, Mezcla Media Collective. [Maxwell Courtright]
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Also screening is a program of Billops and Hatch’s TAKE YOUR BAGS (1998, 11 min, DCP Digital) and THE KKK BOUTIQUE AIN’T JUST REDNECKS: A DOCU/FANTASY ABOUT EVERYBODY’S RACISM (1994, 59 min, DCP Digital), followed by a discussion with Lakshmi Padmanabhan, Assistant Professor of Global Media Studies in the Department of Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University, at the Siskel Center on Friday at 6pm. Tickets include a post-screening reception and a complimentary glass of wine.
Frank Perry's PLAY IT AS IT LAYS (US)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm and Saturday, 4pm
PLAY IT AS IT LAYS marked director Frank Perry's fourth "woman's picture." Working from a script by Joan Didion (adapting her novel), Perry made this his experimental vehicle, incorporating stylistic elements from Michelangelo Antonioni and stream-of-consciousness storytelling. The results are sometimes disorienting, though constantly engaging, as Perry journeys through the thoughts of Maria Lang (Tuesday Weld), the self-absorbed and self-pitying wife of a B-movie director. Lang's search for answers to the "big questions in life," and ultimate decision that such a search is pointless, is not as much a reflection of her self-worth as it is the ridiculous intellectual quests of the bourgeoisie, epitomized by a lengthy sequence in which she randomly shoots at road signs on a highway. Lang's "traumas" and experiences of victimization are seen as the results of her own actions; unlike Perry's other heroines, who are either repressed by their social status or malevolent aggressors, Lang is simply pitiful. Although one can occasionally feel bad for her, it is almost impossible to truly sympathize. Screening as part of the Some Dreamers of the Silver Screen: L.A.'67-'76 series. (1972, 99 min, 35mm) [Joe Rubin]
Christian Petzold’s AFIRE (Germany)
Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
When I worked as a professional film critic, I met a lot of people like the main character of AFIRE: slovenly, socially graceless, self-important, and overly defensive. I’ve probably presented as such myself. Is there something about being a critic (or, really, any kind of writer) in the 21st century that predisposes or conditions a person to these traits? And does it have anything to do with the increase of catastrophic natural disasters brought on by climate change? AFIRE may be a comedy (albeit a very bitter one), yet Christian Petzold isn’t joking when he raises these questions—the film’s final moments, which foreground the thematic concerns to the point where they become inescapable, have an intensity and moral seriousness comparable to the endings of Petzold’s JERICHOW (2008) and TRANSIT (2018). Before then, however, AFIRE plays like a dry, Germanic take on one of Eric Rohmer’s comedies of the bourgeoisie on vacation, charting the interpersonal and sometimes romantic tensions that develop when fussy novelist Leon (Thomas Schubert) and his artist friend Felix (Langston Uibel) are forced to share a summer home with free-spirited Nadja (Petzold regular Paula Beer) and her partner Devid (Enno Trebs). Like the off-putting protagonist of Rohmer’s LE RAYON VERT (1986), Leon spends his whole vacation complaining, mostly about how he’s unable to concentrate on his writing when everyone around him is trying to have fun. But where Rohmer led his heroine on a path to enlightenment, Petzold has less pleasant things in store for Leon, who would come off as a caricature if he weren’t written and performed with such specificity. Leon is so nearly sympathetic—his worst traits are clearly the product of a classic inferiority complex—and this is why his comeuppance carries the sting that it does. Petzold’s ruthlessness with his characters here recalls Vladimir Nabokov’s fiction; so does the intricate narrative game he plays with them in the last 15 minutes. Like Nabokov, Petzold invites ridicule on his characters to draw attention to the foibles of certain times or human types. Unlike Nabokov, Petzold conveys his morals as clearly as his medium allows—a predilection he inherited from his mentor Harun Farocki. The moral of AFIRE? The pursuit of exacting aesthetic standards does seem like folly given that the planet is literally burning. Followed by a pre-recorded Q&A between Petzold and Cine-File co-managing editor Kat Sachs. (2023, 102 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Peter Berlin’s THAT BOY (US/Adult)
Music Box Theatre – Sunday, 9:30pm
“Peter Berlin and I began living in San Francisco at approximately the same time,” wrote Robert Julian for the Bay Area Reporter in 2006, on the release of Jim Tushinski’s documentary THAT MAN: PETER BERLIN. “Seeing him walk down Castro Street in skin-tight white spandex pants, with his prominent genitalia stuffed down one leg, was always a memorable experience… It was, in fact, a train-wreck of an experience; I didn't want to look, and I couldn't look away.” Julian kicks off his review by noting that he saw neither of Berlin’s forays into gay porn, NIGHTS IN BLACK LEATHER (1973) and THAT BOY, which he produced, wrote, directed and starred in. Ironically, the critic’s experience with (or at least around) Berlin recalls the plot of THAT BOY. The German-born filmmaker, photographer, and clothing designer apparently used as inspiration his experience of being an unfettered object of desire while cruising. THAT BOY posits the dynamic between Helmut (Berlin, credited as Peter Burian) and a young, sightless man he encounters on the street. The latter became sightless only recently; before that, he was one of many of the beautiful boys who yearned for Helmut on his Haight-Ashbury walkabouts. Helmut stops to help the young man as he’s crossing the street; the two continue to walk together, with the sightless boy telling Helmut of his sexual desires. These are projected onto and then visualized in fantasy sequences between Helmut and various random passersby checking him out. One sequence in particular emphasizes Berlin’s rampant, albeit benign, narcissism, as he engages with a photographer who not only takes numerous photos of him, but also pleasures him within a veritable shrine made of the images. Despite this acknowledgment of society’s appreciation of his extraordinary good looks, it’s suggested that his interest in the young blind man stems from his inability to see Helmut, who may desire substance over just sex. “I'm not interested in it,” Berlin later said of the film. “I was never happy with any of my films. We made them just to get it off my chest. I don't look at pornography; it's too boring for me. The exciting part about erotic feeling and sensation is in one's head. It's not that you have some physical contact. It’s all about the mental context that surrounds that physical contact. I found this impossible to capture on film.” It would seem Berlin’s career—maybe even his being—centered on this effort to embody via images that which is essentially ineffable. Maybe he didn’t succeed with THAT BOY, but it’s undeniable that he succeeded in capturing himself, in all his beautiful, heady, and supercilious glory. Preceded by Four Chambers’ 2019 short film ARCHETYPES (12 min, DCP Digital). Programmed and presented by the Front Row and Henry Hanson. (1974, 78 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
Tsui Hark’s THE BLADE (Hong Kong)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 6pm
Tsui’s remake of the Shaw Brothers’ THE ONE-ARMED SWORDSMAN (1967) follows the orphaned Ding On (Wehzhuo Zhao) once he’s appointed the master of a sword factory. He leaves on a quest not long after to hunt down the bandit who murdered his father. During his travels, he loses part of his right arm to outlaws in a skirmish. Compensating for his disfigurement, Ding On trains himself in a modified version of martial arts. His friend Ti Dao (Moses Chan) and love interest Siu Ling (Song Lei) try to dissuade his quest but his vengeance perseveres. Photographed by Kwok-Man Keung, few Kung Fu films illuminate faces and use colors to express mood like THE BLADE. Tsui elicits great intensity from long zoom lenses in the battle sequences, disorienting audiences to make them feel as if they were in the confusing haze of war. At the same time, the harmony between actor and camera movement makes each frame commanding. Through Tsui’s editing, the cut dictates the action. In one sequence later in the film, Ding On cuts through bamboo poles and the pieces continuously hit his tailing opponent. To communicate this image in a Hollywood studio film, they would need to book a rig of actors, hire a CGI effects team, and provide overtime for the props department. Tsui has actors repeat simple gestures and aptly cuts the action to deliver a superhuman piece of action. Cinephiles refer to Tsui as the Steven Spielberg of Hong Kong, and like Spielberg, Tsui grabs hold of an audience through expert command over decadent set pieces, armies of extras, and filmmaking technique, only to release them when the credits roll. Screening as part of the Hong Kong Summer series. (1995, 100 mins, 35mm) [Ray Ebarb]
📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED
Christopher Nolan's OPPENHEIMER (US)
Music Box Theatre, AMC River East 21, ShowPlace ICON Theatre and the Logan Theatre, et al. – See Venue website for showtimes
Christopher Nolan’s mid-career masterpiece OPPENHEIMER embodies not just a welcome return to form but new possibilities for the filmmaker. After an unceremonious divorce from Warner Bros., Nolan's first picture with Universal Studios leapfrogs through various settings in 20th-century history as he traces the life and legacy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of Los Alamos Laboratory and chief scientist of the Manhattan Project. Frequent Nolan collaborators Cillian Murphy, Kenneth Branagh, and Gary Oldman (in a surprise appearance) return with an entourage of A-list talent too long to list (but standouts include Emily Blunt, Florence Pugh, Matt Damon, and Robert Downey, Jr.). Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, fresh off Jordan Peele’s NOPE (2022), returns for his fourth Nolan collaboration and finds himself at home among grand vistas of the American Southwest, the idyllic campuses of Princeton and Berkeley, and claustrophobic Washington Senate hearings. Ludwig Göransson recorded the film’s score in a mere and frankly unbelievable five days. If there’s one reason to see OPPENHEIMER in 70mm, the score is reason enough. Nolan, for his part, turns in a career-best film that leans heavily on the style that has made him such a prominent contemporary filmmaker. To say he’s has always been obsessed with time and nonlinear narrative would be to understate the matter; even in OPPENHEIMER, based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s exhaustive biography, Nolan manages to shed the trappings of linear narrative in favor of an achronological structure that maintains tension throughout the film’s three-hour runtime. And tense it is. We all know what happens when the Trinity test goes off, but it’s this scene that’s perhaps the film’s most nerve-racking. Nolan follows Oppenheimer from young adulthood to his twilight years, highlighting some of the more well-known events of his life as well as events that have gone under the radar in pop culture. You know the “destroyer of worlds” line had to be in the film, but you’ll be hard-pressed to guess where it makes its first appearance, and you might even have a chuckle. As miasmic as the film is, it’s lit up with moments of levity, sometimes unexpected, which often come as a welcome respite—the film rarely leaves the chance to breathe or catch up until the credits roll. Nolan brings justice to the story of “the most important man who ever lived,” in his own words. The only question now is, where does he go from here? (2023, 180 min, 70mm [35mm at the Logan]) [George Iskander]
Mstyslav Chernov’s 20 DAYS IN MARIUPOL (Ukraine/Documentary)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, Tuesday, and Thursday, 8:15pm
What will be most rage-inducing about Ukrainian video journalist Mstyslav Chernov’s firsthand account of the siege of Mariupol at the start of the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine is undoubtedly the graphic depictions of violence carried out on the port city’s helpless civilians. Footage of a pregnant woman being carried away from a bombed-out maternity hospital while she grips her lower midsection, in a daze of what appears to be pain and incredulity—we find out later that her pelvis had been completely crushed—will stay with me forever (we also find out later that she and the baby died, a nurse telling Chernov that her injuries were “incompatible with life”), as will the reactions of parents realizing that their children are dead. What may be most shocking, though, isn’t the violence itself; rather it’s the fact that, as the documentary touches upon at several intervals, many believed it to be manufactured. The implication is “fake news,” the two words an oft-mocked, counterfactual dictum that has become as opprobrious as Sieg hiel. Hail victory, the latter means; it’s not too far off to bridge a connection with fake news, a recrimination that always puts its recipient at fault of manipulation and deceit. Thus the utterer is always the victor, never wrong even in the face of fact. It’s not a new concept (at least not anymore), but paired so closely with video documentation of atrocities it assumes that new meaning, becoming a salute to facism and its ability to turn reality into fiction. For example, “The hospital was turned into a film set with extras and actors,” proclaims a newscaster in a clip included in a montage of fake-news allegations from Russian journalists and military personnel, this person in particular calling one of Chernov’s AP colleagues, Evgeniy Maloletka, a “well-known Ukrainian propagandist.” (Chernov and Maloletka, the only two international journalists who stayed in Mariupol after the siege, and two of their colleagues from the Associated Press would eventually be awarded the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service.) Only segments of Chernov and the team’s footage was transmitted during the siege due to lack of reliable internet connection but has now been more thoroughly assembled into this feature-length documentary; some of the interstitials that show how these images were used in world news are a tad self-admiring, but that’s the least of anything irksome going on here. One hopes to say that because all this footage exists it will be believed, but alas, that is not the case. What purpose, then, does this film serve, if the sheer credibility of its images are questioned by the people who theoretically should be most impacted by it, those seeming to need irrefutable proof that such events are occuring? The documentary doesn’t attempt to answer these questions, nor should it. Cinema transforms, but it’s long been the documentary’s ambition to assert, to act as a witness and record the truth for posterity; what does it mean, then, when people accuse journalists and filmmakers of using cinematic effect to documentary aim? One might be asking themselves these questions, but it’s just as likely that viewers will be so enraged by what they see, these 20 days of the terror being faced by civilians in Ukraine, that such Hegelianist ponderings become secondary to the immediacy of the images. The film seems to suggest that this may ultimately be more effective in the short term—some doctors in the film, for example, are nearly begging Chernov and his team to make these atrocities known, to make the world see—but the disquieting proposition put forth by the documentary’s editing, combining the firsthand account with the fake-news speculation, suggests a larger, more ideological war that’s still on the horizon. (2023, 94 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
Johnnie To's THE HEROIC TRIO (Hong Kong)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 4pm
THE HEROIC TRIO feels closer in sensibility to the films of Tsui Hark than it does to Johnnie To’s later output with Milkyway Image. Not that that’s a bad thing. The world needs more superhero movies like this—cheery, goofy, casually feminist, and devoid of self-importance. That it barely makes sense (the most obvious sign of Tsui’s influence) is an added bonus. The trio in question consists of Thief Catcher (Maggie Cheung), Invisible Woman (Michelle Yeoh), and Wonder Woman (Anita Mui), super-powered mystery-women who overcome their differences to stop a villain who’s kidnapping babies all over Hong Kong. The costumes, production design, and fight choreography are all bonkers, making the film an eyeful from start to finish. Olivier Assayas was sufficiently impressed by the film to include clips from it in IRMA VEP (1996)—the fictional director in that movie played by Jean-Pierre Léaud says that Cheung’s character in HEROIC TRIO reminds him of the great anti-heroine of Louis Feuillade’s serial LES VAMPIRES. Watching To’s film, you can sort of see what the Léaud character means; Cheung exudes charisma and an air of mystery, adding unexpected depth to the cartoonish characterization (the other lead actresses aren’t bad either). Screening as part of the Hong Kong Summer series. (1993, 88 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Li Ruijun’s RETURN TO DUST (China)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 1pm and Wednesday, 6pm
They say that home is where the heart is. In several of his films, independent Chinese director Li Ruijun has gone back to his rural home town of Gaotai on the western border of Inner Mongolia to examine the state of personal relationships in a rapidly changing society. His latest film, RETURN TO DUST, eulogizes the connection between human beings and nature without sentimentalizing the harsh life Chinese farmers have as they work the land with primitive tools and suffer exploitation by those who buy their crops. The center of this film, however, is a couple of throwaway people who shoulder their burdens energetically because they have found an unlikely love. Iron (Wu Renlin) is an illiterate, middle-age farmer who is becoming a burden to his family. Similarly, Guiying (Hai Qing) is handicapped, incontinent, and regularly beaten and kept like a dog in a shed by her family. A matchmaker puts them together, and their awkward first days of marriage give way to a gentle opening up and a true union. Watching them work side by side to plow a field with Iron’s donkey pulling a wooden tiller, make bricks from mud for a home they will build themselves, and watch out for each other’s health and safety is beautiful beyond words. Wu and Hai bravely create indelible characters who have been treated cruelly but have not lost their ability to hope and love. But can something so delicate survive in the go-go Chinese society of today? Iron and Guiying may seem worthless to those bent on progress at all costs, but not to each other or those privileged to witness their story. (2022, 133 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Wes Anderson's ASTEROID CITY (US)
Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes
Through ten feature films made over nearly thirty years, Wes Anderson has honed an exacting Lionel Model Train set aesthetic in which human history and emotions often play second banana to design considerations and deadpan humor. Especially since his first stop-motion animation film, FANTASTIC MR. FOX (2009), Anderson's movies have mostly dispensed with any pretense of naturalism in favor of a strictly controlled environment in which the puppeteer's hand often invades the frame to rearrange the furniture or to recast his doll-like charges' fates. Depending on your tolerance for his near-autistic compulsion to demonstrate mastery over his domain, these films can be either an unbearable slog or a charming detour from humdrum reality. I'm an admirer of Anderson's steadfast dedication to his vision but often find that not much about his toy constructions follow me out of the theater after the credits roll. Though he often puts his characters in fraught world-historical settings and programs them to emote after heartbreak or other traumas, these feelings and reactions rarely break through the symmetrical compositions and wind-up gizmos buzzing about in the background. The need to deflect and distract oneself from pain through obsessive hobbyism is a time-honored strategy, especially for men, or, more precisely, boys who refuse to grow up. Anderson's latest has all the hallmarks of his previous work but adds a layer of present-day resonance. Though set in the 1950s, in a small western town on the edge of a nuclear testing site, and featuring a cascade of major and minor movie stars and even an alien landing, the references to COVID lockdown life are everywhere. This time the unreality, panic, and erratic behavior—while still often played for laughs—is not cribbed from beloved short stories or arcana, but from the very recently experienced every day. This gives the film a gravity the previous ones lacked. We all lived through a thing even a control freak like Anderson can't ignore by descending into his basement tinkerer's kingdom and his work is all the better for it. (2023, 105 min, DCP Digital) [Dmitry Samarov]
🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
ALSO SCREENING
âš« Chicago Film Archives
The Chicago Transit Authority, in partnership with the Chicago Film Archives (CFA), presents a new, one-of-a-kind temporary art installation now playing at the Cicero Green Line station (4800 W. Lake St.). The installation, called we love, is a filmic exhibition of home movies and amateur films selected from collections housed and preserved at CFA. The video, which has a runtime of approximately 48 minutes, will be projected onto a wall in the mezzanine area of the station. The video will run day and night through mid-March next year. More info here.
âš« Cinema/Chicago
Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s 2018 Japanese film ASAKO I & II (120 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday, 6:30pm, at the Chicago Cultural Center (78 E. Washington St.). Note that advance tickets are no longer available. Please pick up a Rush Card when doors open at 5:45pm to reserve your place for a last-minute ticket. Open seats will be made available to Rush Card holders 15 minutes prior to showtime on a first-come, first-served basis. Admission is not guaranteed. More info here.
âš« Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Reginald Barker’s 1926 film THE FLAMING FOREST (70 min, 35mm) screens Friday, 4pm, and Saturday, 7pm, as part of the Programmers’ Pics series. More info here.
âš« Gene Siskel Film Center
Savanah Leaf’s 2023 film EARTH MAMA (100 min, DCP Digital) continues. See Venue website for showtimes.
The Midwest Film Festival presents Jason Miller’s 2023 film GHOSTS OF THE VOID (98 min, Digital Projection) on Monday at 7:30pm. More info on all screenings here.
âš« Sideshow Gelato (4819 N. Western Ave.)
The Sideshow Gelato shop presents Sideshow Sinema!, during which they will screen films connected to the shop theme, every Thursday. More info here.
âš« Sweet Void Cinema (3036 W. Chicago Ave.)
Find information on the Humboldt Park microcinema, including its screening and workshop schedule, here.
CINE-LIST: July 28 - August 3, 2023
MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Maxwell Courtright, Ray Ebarb, George Iskander, Marilyn Ferdinand, Joe Rubin, Dmitry Samarov