☀️ THE CHICAGO LATINO FILM FESTIVAL
All screenings below take place at Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema; visit the festival website here for the full schedule and locations where other events may take place
Rey Figueroa’s ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE CARIBBEAN (Puerto Rico)
Friday, 9pm and Sunday, 8:30pm
Film history reflects and refracts into itself with Rey Figueroa’s ONCE UPON A TIME IN CARIBBEAN, a work practically awaiting fawning reactions to its heart-on-sleeve influences from the works of Akira Kurosawa and Sergio Leone, filtered through an excitingly specific Puerto Rican lens. The samurai swords have become machetes, the saloons of the Old West have become the sugar-cane fields of early 20th-century Puerto Rico, but the characters and story structure are pulled straight from a midcentury samurai epic or western film. There’s great fun to be had in recasting these familiar tropes in this new context: the sharp-eyed protagonist here, Juan Encarnación (Héctor Aníbal), a former foreman for a group of sugar-cane workers still recoiling from the aftermath of a violent workers' strike, sets off on a quest to save his wife, Pura (Essined Aponte), from the vicious clutches of the plantation owner’s rapacious son. Encarnación brings along his toddler daughter on this journey, adding LONE WOLF AND CUB (1972) to the growing repertoire of cinematic inspirations, as he chops his way through foe after foe to save his love. Figueroa’s image-making is undeniably eye-catching, most notably in scenes with light and shadow used to highlight vicious action scenes and particularly dramatic moments. The action is a definite highlight, with the machete-slinging stylized from sequence to sequence in ways that keep the momentum and visual storytelling fresh on every occurrence. Figueroa is committed to filling out this tale as a full epic, with various lengthy flashback sequences and further exploration of the American Walker family at the heart of this terrifying colonial scheme that fill out the runtime and provide extra layers of depth and world-building to the whole affair. It’s certainly not a new story, but it wears its influences with pride in pursuit of creating something bold, exciting, and new. Figueroa scheduled to attend both screenings. (2023, 140 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
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Joanna Nelson’s HUNGER (Venezuela)
Saturday, 3:30pm and Monday, 8:30pm
It’s said that opposites attract, and in Joanna Nelson’s HUNGER, this applies to her protagonists’ relationship with their home country of Venezuela. Selina (Claudia Rojas) lives in Italy, having pursued higher education there as a means of escape; unable to get a job that will sponsor a visa, she delivers pizza and considers marrying one of the partners in her throuple to get papers. She goes back to Venezuela for the holidays, having lied to her parents about her immigration status and knowing that she might not be able to return to Europe. Meanwhile, Roberto, an idealistic engineer for the country’s transportation ministry, has a dream of helping to improve the metro system. While many are looking to leave the country, he’s stayed behind in hopes of making it a better place. Having once been in school together, they meet again at a party and embark on a tentative romance despite their respective hurdles: Selina is desperately trying to get out of Venezuela while dealing with her wealthy, corrupt parents, while Roberto contends with the country’s desolate economic landscape. Considering the migrant crisis and its manifestation in our own city, it’s interesting to see the subject explored from such perspectives. Cinema’s ability to illuminate that which we either don’t know or don’t fully understand is on display here, packaged in a narratively digestible fashion that makes hard truths palatable for those not privy to the problem’s innerworkings. Nelson scheduled to attend both screenings. (2024, 110 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
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Sean Mattison’s PETRO (Colombia/Documentary)
Saturday, 4pm and Monday, 7:30pm
“It's not easy being Colombia's 1st left-wing president,” reads a recent headline on NPR’s website. Sean Mattison’s thoughtful documentary about Gustavo Petro, who in 2022 was elected after beating out Rodolfo Hernández Suárez, a Trump-like figure who amassed a cult of personality spurred by TikTok virality, in a nail biter of a run-off election answers why. What makes his job difficult is the meat of this incisive portrait; for those unfamiliar with Colombia’s political landscape, Mattison provides a comprehensive sketch not just of the contemporary scene but also of the history leading up to it. Petro had been a member of the guerrilla group M-19, also known as the 19th of April Movement, which was spurred by the allegedly fraudulent 1970 presidential elections. (The ruling National Front coalition had formed a power-sharing agreement that effectively prevented tertiary parties from participating, among other issues.) Peace from an entrenched culture of violence was the alleged goal of some and the genuine goal of others, even if violence was undertaken to achieve this. It’s often a philosophical quandary, considering which groups are perhaps justified in their use of violence to combat oppression and those for which it’s merely a form of political aggression. Mattison’s film doesn’t dwell on this, but these considerations arose for me as details of Colombia’s various factions, from the M-19 to the FARC (in English called the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) to right-wing paramilitary groups were elaborated upon. Petro’s plan has since become known as the pursuit of “total peace,” which involves negotiating with the country’s various armed groups and is an extension of the 2016 Peace Agreement between the government under then-president Juan Manuel Santos (who would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts) and the FARC, though violence later resumed for various reasons, such as the next president, Iván Duque Márquez, undermining progress in order to appease his conservative colleagues. An even more hopeful focus of the film is Petro’s vice president, Francia Márquez, the first Afro-Colombian to hold such an office; their combined progressivism is inspiring. The film is structured around the campaigning and later electoral process, culminating in the first election, then the run-off, and finally the historic outcome, Petro’s election to the presidency. Preceded by Anderson Bardot’s 2023 short film I SEEK YOUR HELP TO BURY A MAN (20 min, Digital Projection) from Brazil. Mattison scheduled to attend both screenings. (2023, 98 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
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Felipe Carmona’s PRISON IN THE ANDES (Chile)
Saturday, 6:30pm and Monday, 5:30pm
The title location, a group home at the foothills of the mountains, may as well be a luxury resort—there are no bars on the walls, the jailers are lenient, and even the food seems pretty good. As for the prisoners, they’re the scum of the earth: top brass under Augusto Pinochet, they oversaw the torture and murder of thousands of people as part of his evil regime. PRISON IN THE ANDES concerns the day-to-day lives of these men, now in their twilight years and still unrepentant about having committed crimes against humanity, as they tend to their hobbies and enjoy casual relationships with their guards, who seem all too comfortable acquiescing to them. First-time director Felipe Carmona treats this situation as the stuff of black comedy, depicting the former generals as overgrown babies and the guards as little more than babysitters. The satire is unsubtle, but it highlights a troubling real-world irony, that the “punishment” for Pinochet’s thugs looks like comfortable living by most other people’s standards. It also raises the questions of what is an appropriate punishment for men like these and how should Chile as a nation historicize the heinous events of the Pinochet era. The film’s humor works as a coping mechanism for confronting such difficult questions; it also has the effect of cutting the prisoners down to size, which seems fitting, as they once considered themselves superhuman. Preceded by Diogo Baldaia’s 2023 short film WHY ARE YOU IMAGE PLUS? (9 min, Digital Projection) from Portugal. Carmona scheduled to attend both screenings. (2023, 105 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Agustin Godoy’s LONG TIME NO SLEEP (Argentina)
Tuesday, 5:45pm and Thursday, 6pm
Agustin Godoy’s joyful debut feature often feels like the answer to a question no one asked: “What if Jacques Tati directed a Guy Ritchie film?” The foolish protagonist, Mapache (Agustín Gagliardi, a pratfall aficionado), inexplicably finds himself in possession of a backpack thrown at him at the tail end of a carefully coordinated series of hand-offs across Buenos Aires. The ultimate contents of this backpack (double-locked, mind you) are of little-to-no importance, just as long as we know that everyone wants it and will do anything to get their hands on it. That Mapache—with the aid of a tarot-obsessed new love interest (Agustina Rudi)—becomes just as obsessed with retaining this MacGuffin is a testament to the nonsense logic Godoy has concocted, alongside Mapache’s own newly awakened desires of seeking purpose within a directionless existence. LONG TIME NO SLEEP can honestly be best described as a series of chases: characters running away, characters running in pursuit, towards goals, away from danger, all in all trekking at breakneck speeds with such intensity it would make Tom Cruise jealous. That Godoy’s comedic instincts are equally sharp and idiotic is what keeps this effort as light and enjoyable as it is, reaching an end both abrupt and inevitable, with our heroes, as ever, chasing down their destiny on foot. Preceded by Iván Bustinduy’s 2023 short film ANIMAL TRANSPORT (19 min, Digital Projection) from Argentina. Actor Agustín José Gagliardi scheduled to attend both screenings. (2022, 87 mins, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
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Monserrat Larqué’s OVER THERE, LOVE IS A DESTINY (Mexico)
Tuesday, 8:45pm and Thursday, 9pm
When the characters in Monserrat Larqué’s OVER THERE, LOVE IS A DESTINY, say “over there,” they mean the United States, the magnet that has robbed the small Mexican town of San Antonio of its men. Larqué, making her feature film directing debut, co-wrote this charming romcom that stars Pablo Astiazarán and Giovanna Zacarías as childhood friends Oscar and Martha who were separated when Oscar emigrated and settled in Los Angeles. Oscar returns home when he gets word that his father is dying, arriving too late to speak to him one last time. His plans to return to L.A. the next day are thwarted when he misses the once-a-week bus, and, well, one thing leads to another pretty much as you’d expect it to. Despite the familiar formula, the film’s cast is uniformly endearing, the cinematography of Ramon Orozco Stoltenberg gorgeous, and the idea of a town without telephones or internet reception intriguing. Preceded by Leticia Akel Escárate’s 2023 short film YAYA (20 min, Digital Projection) from Chile. Larqué scheduled to attend both screenings. (2022, 101 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Daniel Peralta’s PRIMERA PERSONA (Chile)
Wednesday, 8:30pm
A small, isolated town on the picturesque Pacific Coast of Chile is the setting for director co-screenwriter Daniel Peralta’s contemplative examination of love and loneliness. He juxtaposes two couples, one young and the other middle-age, whose relationships are fraught to suggest that love and its true expression are two separate things. We first meet Isabel (Ignacia Uribe) and Darío (Pedro Godoy) driving to her mother’s beach house. They argue and then have make-up sex when they arrive, something that seems to be an increasingly unsatisfactory routine for them. Through Darío, we learn that cult rock musician Julián Cabeza (Pablo Álvarez), who retreated from making music at least a decade before, lives in town and is going to be interviewed for a music magazine, signaling a renaissance in the musician’s career. We see the younger couple befriend him and Isabel come on to him. But his heart is with his longtime love, Aline (Ana Burgos), who has left him and returned repeatedly for the past 20 years. The push and pull of both relationships are sometimes painful to watch, and we sense that Isabel and Darío are following, so to speak, in Julián and Aline footsteps. Julían finally manages to tell Aline how much he loves her in a new song for the re-release of his first album, a personal work that he nonetheless was too immature to invest with deep feeling. But, Peralta intimates, growing up and into our feelings can come too late. Preceded by Helena Girón and Samuel M. Delgado’s 2023 short film BLOOM (18 min, Digital Projection) from Spain. Peralta scheduled to attend. (2024, 109 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Carlos Caridad Montero’s CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION (Venezuela)
Wednesday, 9pm
The political and economic history of Venezuela in the 20th century is marked by coups, military juntas, dictatorships, enormous prosperity followed by hyperinflation, and, always, protest movements against massive government corruption, mismanagement, and repression. The tumultuous 1980s, which saw the rise of socialist politician Hugo Chávez, is the starting point of Carlos Caridad Montero’s engrossing CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION. The film follows the fortunes of two Caracas families, one headed by a scary revolutionary and diehard supporter of Chávez, the other by a self-absorbed manager in Venezuela’s largest oil company who is firmly against the socialist policies of the Chávez government. These families are linked through the friendship and subsequent romance of Tomás (Mauricio Celimen) and Laura (Naomi De Oliveira), the children born to each family on the same night, as their lives change dramatically with the politics of the time. The street filming is thrilling and atmospheric, locating the economic and social strata in various neighborhoods and the homes in which the families live. The film is fast-paced and can be confusing to anyone not familiar with recent Venezuelan history. But Caridad Montero does such a good job of threading through the privations of food and gas shortages, numerous street protests, and the hardened attitudes of both the Chávistas and the neoliberal opposition that it shocked me into silence at the horrible waste of it all, so invested was I in the fates of the characters his actors brought vividly to life. As Laura says in voiceover near the end of the film, Venezuelans only have the memory of the paradise that they chose to destroy. Caridad Montero scheduled to attend. (2023, 111 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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George Walker’s WOMAN WHO CRIES (Brazil)
Thursday, 9pm
What makes this Brazilian feature so unpredictable is that writer-director George Walker doesn’t fix his gaze on any character in particular. THE WOMAN WHO CRIES centers on a seven-year-old boy named Miguel, though Walker also shifts attention to other members of his family, expanding the film’s perspective so that a group portrait comes into focus. That portrait, when it emerges, turns out to be a pretty sad one: not only are Miguel’s parents divorced, but neither parent seems to care very much about him; they’re too wrapped up in their personal lives to give him much consideration. This neglect has led Miguel to form a strong attachment to his family’s maid, a Venezuelan immigrant who had to abandon her own child to come to Brazil. When the movie begins, he already seems to have a stronger bond with her than he does with his own mother. The film’s title refers to a character in a story the maid makes up to share with Miguel, which speaks to the private world they’ve constructed together. The significance of that private world becomes clearer as the movie proceeds, as Walker reveals the extent of the characters’ loss and disappointment. Even then, the sadness of the film doesn’t feel too pronounced—the tone is generally delicate and muted, reflecting Miguel’s curious view of the world. It’s generally soothing to watch in spite of the melancholy subject matter, which makes it all the more upsetting when Walker disrupts the boy’s story to observe the unhappy adults in his life. Walker scheduled to attend. (2023, 75 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Martín Duplaquet’s NO ONE (Chile)
Thursday, 9:15pm
Set in 2006, Martín Duplaquet’s NO ONE takes place amidst a swell of economic prosperity; the country’s GDP grew at an average per capita rate of 4.1% between 1991 and 2005, the world average during that same period being just 1.4%. But rather than focus on the winners, Duplaquet’s films hones in on those who, despite the boom, are still losing. Former banker José (Willy Semler) has lost big on an investment; as a result, he’s separated from his wife, and his brother-in-law, with whom he went in on the investment, hates him. When he accompanies a friend to the bank, however, things take a turn as he discovers an ingenious way to commit a robbery. He enlists the help of two friends, one of them another former banker who’s left the industry after taking a stand against unfair banking practices; soon thereafter a beautiful woman makes her way into the mix and into José’s bed. Together they rob multiple banks in such a subtle way that José starts being referred to in the media as the Ghost. An especially committed detective is hot on his trail, seeming to destroy both himself and his career in the process, and the banks aren’t too keen on continually being humiliated by these silent strikes. The snazzy presentation and convivial performances of this Robin Hood-esque potboiler hold one's interest, even if it’s mostly well-trod territory in the realm of the heist film genre. Setting the story against such a flourishing economy, however, does add in the way of commentary about the neverending pestilence that is capitalism, which haunts us even at its most virile. Duplaquet scheduled to attend. (2023, 110 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
🧅 ONION CITY EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL
Virtual programs available to stream through Sunday
Light Bath
Available to rent here
The main themes running through this program include community, collectivity, memory, and the environment around us. The opening work, Adam Cohen’s LEANED BACK (2023, 19 min), emphasizes the construction of communal love for bicycles in Chicago’s segregated neighborhoods. The more computer-generated films nurture their own form of humanity. Alice Brygo's ARDENT OTHER (2022, 16 min) takes a group of people on the street and regenerates them in a vacuum. The film seems transfixed on their visages and body language, allowing the audience to explore each individual with omnipotence. Per Bifrost's HYPNOSUGGESTION (2023, 8 min) dives into memory, albeit through technological singularity. Although this science fiction piece focuses on computer consciousness, the memories generated come from the human experience, connecting both past and future. Even the antithesis of this, forgotten moments, plays a central role in TT Takemoto's LION IN THE WIND (2023, 5 min), which features a decomposing image of a martial artist performing windmills. Whether ecological or the people in the everyday, the program feels like an acknowledgement of our surroundings. Charles Cadkin’s SUPERFUND (2023, 3 min) shows us the nature of West Chicago’s Rare Earths Facility, Kress Creek and Reed-Keppler Park in a vivid flash of cuts and color, a medium’s exploration of mother nature. In opposition, Jose Benavides’ ANTI SOCIAL STUDIES (2023, 15 min) depicts urban decay; it's almost a sad ballad for a city in disrepair. Colectivo Los Ingrávidos’ THE WINGED STONE (2023, 9 min) reminds us of the purity of nature and memory. There is a handmade quality to all the films, many of which were shot on 16mm or 35mm. Federica Foglia's GLITTER FOR GIRLS (2023, 4 min) doesn’t even use actual visuals as an approach; it’s a direct collage to the film itself, redefining the use of the medium’s tools. [Ray Ebarb]
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The Wisdom Tooth
Available to rent here
Family ties and self-definition are the two main themes running through this shorts program, and they complement each other naturally. After all, a person can’t feel truly comfortable as part of a family until they feel accepted for who they are, and vice versa. Augustina Aranda’s SAY SOMETHING (2023, 10 min) comes closest to stating this message explicitly, as it contains an encounter between the filmmaker and her father in which the former confronts the latter for not being a more supportive parent. This conversation is illustrated with quick, pencil-stroke animation, while the sections in which Aranda speaks lovingly about her father, a Paraguayan immigrant to the US, are illustrated with camcorder footage he shot over the past several decades. The different media interact provocatively, resulting in a mosaic that’s visually and emotionally complex. in the interval (2022, 24 min), aeryka hollis o’neil’s meditation on Black transgender identity, also employs a range of media, from present-day Zoom conversations to archival footage of Nina Simone performing. The variety of formats feels appropriate, given the range of considerations at hand; the work explores such topics as rifts within the transgender community, hate crimes committed against trans people, and representations of different groups of people in media. Likewise, the discourse ranges from academic to casual, which reflects the panoply of voices around these issues. In Alex Lo and Sebastian Smith’s sebastian_1 (2024, 14 min), the eponymous subject must deal with multiple perspectives about himself. Sebastian is a young man in Toronto who documents himself as he’s being treated for an unspecified mental illness; the work is a briskly assembled collage of footage he self-recorded in which he talks about his condition, how it’s discussed in the medical literature, and how he feels about all this. It concludes with Sebastian putting on lipstick and getting ready for a night on the town, suggesting that he—and not his condition or his psychiatrists—are in control of his life. Invigorating in a different way is Anna Kipervaser’s GRANDMA GALYA AND GRANDPA ARADIY (2023, 5 min), a brief portrait of an elderly Ukrainian couple as they make funny faces and play with fabrics. Composed of short, sprightly takes, it conveys feelings of love eternally renewed over many years. Rounding out the program are two short animated works: Prapat Jiwarangsan’s PARASITE FAMILY (2022, 5 min) and Jordan Wong’s I WOULD’VE BEEN HAPPY (2023, 9 min). In the former, the filmmaker manipulates old film negatives through techniques both analog and digital, climaxing with images that morph into one another with the aid of AI technology. Per Jiwarangsan, these images are significant for being “faces [that] represent a certain kind of family that is parasitic on Thai society, the kind of families and institutions that absorb wealth and power, gradually evolving into a new species of monsters.” These anonymous faces are transformed into a kind of spectacle, however, suggesting that art has the power to transform the malign into the beautiful. Wong’s intricately animated short employs “coded pictographs and schematic abstractions applied onto glazed ceramic tiles and quilted cyanotype fabric” to illustrate a testimony by the filmmaker’s mother about how miserable she was in her marriage to Wong’s father. The mother’s painful memories and daring honesty clash constructively with the imaginative imagery, a clever representation of how involved is the process of healing from trauma. Also in the program is Camila de Lucas’ MAPA DENTAL (DENTAL MAP) (2023, 5 min). [Ben Sachs]
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From Women, For Everyone
Available to rent here
This program begins with two pieces that address the horrific reality of America post Roe v. Wade. The first, Ruth Hayes’ HEMORRHAGE (2023, 4 min), is a brief animated work that communicates anger and condemnation at the Supreme Court justices who overturned this essential decision. Over newspaper articles about the Court, Hayes imposes images of coat hangers, some of them dripping with blood. The message is not subtle, but it needs to be delivered loud and clear: the justices who trampled on the right to a safe abortion have blood on their hands, as more women will turn to unsafe practices when denied safe ones. The second work, Lynne Sachs’ CONTRACTIONS (2024, 12 min), also considers risky methods of terminating pregnancies when one of the abortion doctors interviewed on the soundtrack relates some of the more heartbreaking questions she’s been asked by patients. This piece is principally concerned with how anti-abortion crusaders have terrorized doctors and people seeking abortions, resulting in an upsetting portrait of misogyny in this country; the film also spotlights the heroism of abortion doctors and women who have helped others procure safe abortions at great risk. Sachs (no relation) returns throughout CONTRACTIONS to images of groups of women in the parking lot of a women’s health clinic in Tennessee, always with their backs to the camera. These are powerful images: the women are on the one hand depersonalized and, on the other, standing in solidarity. Korean filmmaker Chaerin Im’s animated piece I AM A HORSE (2022, 8 min) reflects on a different kind of solidarity and a different kind of struggle, taking inspiration from the predictive birth dreams, or tae-mong that Im’s mother had when pregnant with her and her twin sister. The ink drawings that depict these dreams are beautiful and imaginative, though a concluding title card undercuts their charm with the information that the tae-mong tradition is rooted in gender stereotypes and notions of female subservience. The tone of the program starts to brighten with Deborah Stratman’s OTHERHOOD (2023, 3 min), a characteristically rich collage that combines poetry, aphorisms, evocative nature sounds, and gorgeous natural imagery. It culminates with a triumphant call for self-definition that’s all the more poignant in light of the preceding pieces. Zuza Banasińska’s GRANDMAMAUNTSISTERCAT (2024, 23 min) takes the program in a decidedly whimsical direction. Made up of shots from old Polish educational films, the piece is narrated by a little girl who speaks of her birth, her place in her family, and matriarchal traditions in eastern European culture. The footage is largely taken from science films; in this new, reappropriated context, it seems like the stuff of science fiction. Next on the program is FIRST AID–TEST SERIES 1 (2022, 9 min), a German work directed by Maria Anna Dewes and Myriam Thyes, an odd collection of shots, mostly of arms and legs, in what appears to be some kind of factory, performing arcane actions. Showing body parts without the context of whole bodies (and with the context of industrial space instead), the filmmakers defamiliarize intimate parts of ourselves. The program concludes with the Canadian short LEGS (2023, 15 min), directed by Jennifer Still, Christine Fellows, and Chantal Mierau. In this work, Still reads a poem she wrote on the soundtrack while the images alternate between illustrating the text literally and responding to it on a more abstract level. Again, body parts are defamiliarized, this time through such poetic images as an empty swimming pool and panty hose being filled with sheet cake. The text is lovely, addressing female identity in a manner that feels awestruck and hopeful, marking a moving finish to a strong, provocative program. [Ben Sachs]
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Nocturnal Cacophony
Available to rent here
The "nocturnal" in this program’s films refers less to the actual nighttime and more to the loneliness of that time, as well as the worlds we inhabit when completely alone—the films we make in our heads or see on the backs of our eyelids. Leading the program is Maxime Martinot’s THE FILM YOU ARE ABOUT TO SEE (2023, 11 min), a sort of thought experiment in this vein, collecting the text from several dozen audience warning title cards from films ranging from PICKPOCKET to JOKER. In isolation, the cards produce anticipation for films almost certainly more provocative than the ones that really exist, though the imagined version is what tends to drive discourse anyway. For the viewer, this exercise is a sort of mind-palace-workout, priming them for the unfixed mental terrain of the rest of the program. Many of the films are fantasies of the self, like the beguiling freak narrator of Joseph Wilcox’s NOBODY WANTS TO FIX THINGS ANYMORE (2023, 4 min) who fancies himself a sort of vigilante handyman, developing an obsession with a particular rock used to prop up a city bench. Others are more explicitly pathetic, like the animated blob of a man who trolls the internet for meaning in Luis Grané’s NOWHERE STREAM (2023, 7 min) or the titular pseudo-cop who patrols empty mall parking lots in Tanner Masseth’s PORTRAIT 001: SECURITY GUARD (2023, 12 min). Elsewhere, these reveries are free of people, like the astringent images of watch ads and airline lobbies that make up Michael Bucuzzo’s STRESS EATING TIME (2023, 10 min). But the program’s strongest material focuses on the tension between an individual and their fantasy, like Philip Thompson’s LIVING REALITY (2024, 16 min). Starring Thompson himself as Theo, the sole Black friend in the sitcom friend group, the film is a sort of longform anti-comedy where Theo constantly finds himself out of the conversation-and-laugh-track rhythm of those around him, whose disinterest in Theo’s life aims to uphold both a racial and formal status quo. It’s a film of stark contrasts, with Thompson nailing the production details of a cheesy '90s sitcom only to undercut them with stark images of Theo’s own depressed state outside of the group, calling into question the reality of the character and whether his projected friend group is its own sort of pathology. This potential structure is hinted at in Ross Meckfessel’s new film SPARK FROM A FALLING STAR (2023, 21 min) as well. The main human form we see in the film is a man asleep at the wheel of his car in an empty parking lot, both early and late in the film. What comes between is a series of typically Meckfesselian, gorgeous-but-inscrutable images that focus mostly on city spaces but always with some slight abstraction at play. At night, the cityscapes are reduced to points of light, reduced by invisibility but extended by the light’s halos so that the architecture becomes a potent mix of seen and imagined. During the day, Meckfessel shoots crowds through layers of glass floors or warped in mirrored walls, always with some mediating mechanism. It’s not clear whether this is a sort of intentional self-reference, a notoriously obscure filmmaker presenting a man whose own dreams seem out of reach for both him and the audience. But it’s the film in the program that perhaps best captures the "nocturnal cacophony" felt when you zone out, receding into yourself until everything around you changes. [Maxwell Courtright]
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The Life That I Was Living
Available to rent here
The title of the first film in this program, I WAS THERE (2023, 14 min), could be said to represent its theme. Each of the six shorts establishes a particular and rather personal viewpoint that places both its participants and viewers at a certain place and time, a specificity from which the broadness of universal truths emanates. Chi Jang Yin’s film mainly assumes the perspective of a Japanese doctor who witnessed the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima after attending to a patient away from the hospital where he worked and where all but three people were killed by the bomb. Where his sporadic narration evinces one perspective, the images on screen show various facets of the American military apparatus, conveyed through archival pictures and footage and, most damningly, written records that illuminate our country’s thinking behind the decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan. It might be lazy to evoke OPPENHEIMER (though Yin has been researching the Manhattan Project and discourse surrounding it for the past decade), but this nevertheless brings to mind the debates around that film; the title is something of a response through its evocation of a singular, human presence in the face of such atrocity. Oona Taper’s THIS TRAIN IS INVISIBLE UNTIL IT CRASHES (2023, 4 min) is decidedly lighter, composed of drawings made while Taper was on Chicago’s rapid transit system and featuring interpretations of common phrases related to delays that can be heard while riding on it, such as “signal problems” and “an incident.” People watching this in Chicago will certainly think “I was there” on hearing them, again relating to the idea of a dual specificity between creator and viewer that transcends exactitude and in this case becomes a series of poetic ruminations. Shot on a 16mm Bolex, Shawn Antoine II’s FOR THOSE THAT LIVED THERE (2023, 6 min) is a ghostly portrait of the former Cabrini-Green Public Housing Projects and the gentrified community that emerged in its wake. “A product of bad politics, failed policy, and official neglect,” says the voice of a broadcast journalist above the haunting images, “it exists unseen except by those who live there,” this being the quip from which the film takes its name. Here the specific person whose viewpoint is invoked remains unseen (the plight of migrants to the city is also considered), thus becoming a stand-in for a communal reckoning with forces outside of its control. I won’t pretend to understand Raine Yung’s I CAN NO LONGER SEE (2023, 8 min), but I appreciate the visual mayhem nonetheless. Technically a series of short experimental films rolled into one, the combined effort results in an opaque self-portrait that shows way, way more than it tells. Daniel Baker-Wells’ THE PRINCESS AND THE PEACOCK (2024, 14 min) is, ironically, a rather straightforward conjuration (at least in terms of how it conveys information about its subject; visually, it’s a trip) of alternative-lifestyle freak show performers in the FLINTA (femme, lesbian, Intersex, non-binary, trans, a-gender) community. The candidness of the filmmaking allows for the subject, Mona, a 22-year-old trans woman from France who’s living in Berlin, where she does a freak show-type performance involving needles and peacock feathers, to properly take center stage and communicate the significance of her community and what she practices therein. Conversely, Laurentia Genske’s CUANDO LLEGUE LA NEBLINA (WHEN THE FOG COMES) (2023, 24 min) uses various modes (photos, animation and audio) to tell the stories of four people with different relationships to the city of Tijuana along the Mexican-American border. The array of stylings befits the concept of multiple perspectives speaking to similar, albeit still different, lived experiences, as do all the films in this illuminating program. [Kat Sachs]
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Chica Barbosa & Fernanda Pessoa’s SWING AND SWAY (Brazil)
Available to rent here
Much ink has been spilled over the power of cinema to connect us with our fellow theatergoers, but what of the power of movies—specifically making our own movies—to connect us with each other one on one? That's what filmmakers (and real-life friends) Chica Barbosa and Fernanda Pessoa explore in their nakedly earnest film essay SWING AND SWAY, a collection of video diaries pinging back and forth and chronicling two separate-but-linked lives connected through separate-but-linked catastrophes. It’s April 2020, and as Chica adjusts to her new life in Los Angeles, Fernanda remains back home in São Paulo, where the pair's friendship is further tested by a world barely holding itself together amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. To stave off even further encroaching modes of isolation, Barbosa and Pessoa, two friends linked by artistry, decide to spend the next year communicating solely through video letters, each inspired by a different experimental female filmmaker, all within three-week-spans. The result—taking inspiration from the likes of Cheryl Dunye, Carolee Schneeman, Marjorie Keller, Chick Strand, and a host of other cinematic voices—becomes a collage of internal thoughts literalized, bodies and buildings and nature colliding artfully into each other, as the dual realities of would-be dictators Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro become a despairing unifying tie between two friends working to stay afloat amidst a work aiming to drown them. Through interviews, confessionals, stop-motion sequences, and image-layering, Barbosa and Pessoa successfully create a bond through filmmaking that brings them closer and closer to each other—thematically, emotionally, and artistically—especially at a time when such proximity seemed near impossible. Preceded by Steve Reinke’s 2023 short SUNDOWN (8 min). (2023, 82 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
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Note that some short films within the programs may not be available to stream.
📽️ Crucial Viewing
Daïchi Saïto’s earthearthearth (Canada/Experimental) and James Benning’s LOS (US/Experimental)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Saturday, 7pm (Saïto) and Sunday, 8pm (Benning)
Doc Films is the place to be this weekend if you care about experimental cinema, with two amazing big-screen experiences by two masters of the avant garde. I’d go so far as to call Daïchi Saïto’s earthearthearth (2021, 30 min, 35mm) one of the big-screen events of recent years and one of the only 21st-century films worthy of comparison to 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY in its formal daring and uncanny splendor. Composed of footage shot in the Atacama Desert and scored to saxophone and loop improvisations by Jason Sharp, Saïto’s film invokes a state of gobsmacked wonder toward the natural world, partly through the daunting landscapes and partly through a range of inspired cinematic tricks. “Though the soundtrack’s fleshy grain connects the film’s marvels to the corporeal viewers that behold them, it also compels us to project our consciousnesses beyond our mortal bodies,” Ara Osterwell wrote in Artforum. “Through his oneiric combination of sound and image, Saïto catapults us into the realm of the heavens.” Saïto shot earthearthearth on 16mm and blew it up to 35mm, resulting in a distinctive filmic texture; James Benning, on the other hand, shot and exhibited LOS (2001, 87 min, 16mm) on 16mm, which makes it seem even more like a Frederick Wiseman movie without the people. The second film of Benning’s California trilogy, LOS comprises 35 portraits of the greater Los Angeles area, each portrait a two-and-a-half-minute static shot. Benning’s compositional sense is always a wonder to behold in a theater, where the images are bigger than you, the surrounding environment is dark, and the distractions are kept to a minimum—only in these conditions can the work achieve its transcendental beauty. One shot in particular—of an expressway in early evening, the multiple lines of cars lit up like components of a vast machine, the duration just long enough to mesmerize—provides a good reason for why cinema exists. [Ben Sachs]
Allan Dwan’s PADLOCKED (US/Silent)
Chicago Film Society at the Music Box Theatre – Saturday, 11:30am
Slated as Paramount’s biggest picture for the fall of 1926, this Allan Dwan-directed melodrama tells the story of a young woman searching for values in a confusing and rip-roaring world. The narrative, adapted from a novel by Rex Beach, follows Edith, a girl resentful and befuddled in her search for her own values while her narrow-minded father runs her life. Edith’s mother declares that the girl’s heart is "padlocked" by her father. She dies in a fire; and when the patriarch remarries to a puritanical social worker, the couple forces Edith into a reformatory, from which she escapes. In an adventure from the cabaret and "women’s court," Edith forges her way through a hew of tempters and tyrants to find her values and emancipation. Magnificently shot by a young James Wong Howe, Lois Moran gives a moving performance as Edith. She walks a tightrope of the hypnotic full silent film star power and believability of a young girl stumbling her way through the world. Only making her debut a year prior, this young ingenue would go on to have an illustrious career and short-lived affair with F. Scott Fitzgerald. PADLOCKED advances a rarely-seen perspective of the Roaring Twenties: the young femme point of view. From this angle, the contradictions of the moment, both spectacular and repulsive, reveal themselves through the girl’s eyes. It’s particularly bold for a Coolidge-era Hollywood film to paint reformatories and Christianity in a negative light. Conservatism becomes the antithesis to the goals of our protagonist, an unimaginable statement even today. On the other side of the sliding scale, there is a criticism of laissez-faire 1920s sexuality. For a film that was almost entirely lost (but restored thanks to the work of San Francisco Silent Film Festival), this picture endures as a statement on the emancipation of young people trying to figure out what they want to do with their lives. Preceded by Fred Guiol’s 1925 short silent film FLAMING FLAPPERS (9 min, 35mm). Both with live musical accompaniment from David Drazin. (1926, 80 min, 35mm) [Ray Ebarb]
Akira Kurosawa's KAGEMUSHA (Japan)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Saturday, 8:30pm
KAGEMUSHA holds the distinction of being both a powerful film that expresses thematic ideas Akira Kurosawa put in nearly all his films as well as a somewhat by-the-numbers historical drama. When a petty criminal is discovered to have an incredible likeness to a warlord who recently died, he is hired to impersonate him as a political decoy to help win the feudal wars that Japan was then experiencing. It's decided that they'll have this common thief stand in for the warlord, so as to not let any of the rivals know of the death or show any signs of weakness in the clan. As time passes, the son of the deceased warlord becomes more upset with the idea of this imposter being the leader and begins to test him politically, hoping to trip him up. Despite all his attempts, the imposter not only convincingly "becomes" the dead leader but actually leads troops into a major battle. Only in the fog of war is his true identity revealed. More than just a battle epic, this exploration into concepts of self, war, and court politics makes KAGEMUSHA one of Kurosawa's best jidaigeki (pre-Meiji Restoration period pieces, aka samurai films). This is a movie that wholeheartedly believes in nuance. Perhaps that's why, despite both George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola being executive producers, it’s considered one of Kurosawa's minor works. It doesn't have the clear-cut, American Western film binary of good guys and bad guys that SEVEN SAMURAI (1954), YOJIMBO (1961), and SANJURO (1962) had. There is no hero, or even an anti-hero. Instead, the film explores the concept of power itself. KAGEMUSHA asks if power lies in the person or in those around him. There is an almost existential exploration of the self. Unlike many of Kurosawa's other samurai films, this isn't a period piece but a piece of historical fiction. The figures in the film, besides the imposter, were real people. The battles discussed actually happened. This blending of fantasy and history creates a hazy verisimilitude that aids Kurosawa's dissection of the self and power. This approach allows the audience to have a baked-in familiarity of the narrative. Any student of Japanese history will already know the outcome of these battles, but by framing his story this way, Kurosawa can fully focus on his philosophical themes while using the overarching plot as familiar shorthand. In practice, you can see the influence of KAGEMUSHA in the later works of Tarantino, particularly in how INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (2009) and ONCE UPON A TIME... IN HOLLYWOOD (2019) use historical characters and events as a backdrop for character studies. Perhaps the younger, cheekier Kurosawa could have called this film ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEDIEVAL JAPAN, what with its folk tale framing. The epic scale of the film and its extravagant use of color very much foreshadow his next film, RAN (1985). Perhaps that's also why KAGEMUSHA has been unfortunately relegated to minor work status; it was immediately eclipsed by one of the greatest films ever made—which is unfortunate, because KAGEMUSHA truly is up there with RASHOMON (1950), SEVEN SAMURAI, RAN, THRONE OF BLOOD (1957), and YOJIMBO as one of Kurosawa’s great considerations of the psyche of man. Screening as part of the Programmer’s Picks series. (1980, 180 min, 35mm) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
Bertrand Bonello’s THE BEAST (France/Canada)
Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes
The closest precedent to THE BEAST may be Léos Carax’s POLA X (1999), another eerie communion between a cryptic American author and an equally cryptic French filmmaker working more than a century apart. In POLA X, Carax transposed Herman Melville’s novel Pierre, or the Ambiguities from mid-19th century America to late 20th century France, keeping the basic narrative structure but mostly using the text as a talisman to guide his film towards novel insights about privilege, doomed love, and the nature of art. In THE BEAST, Bonello takes the basic premise of a Henry James story called “The Beast in the Jungle” and uses it as a jumping-off point for a fragmented, time-hopping narrative experiment on themes of identity, performance, and the fear of love. Both films approach adaptation as a form of conversation, proposing cinematic analogues for what Melville and James did and considering what these visionary authors might have to tell us about our own time. Bonello seems especially well suited to take on James; like the author of The Turn of the Screw and The Sacred Fount, this French auteur specializes in narratives that are ornate, inscrutable, and frequently spooky. But where James famously subverted psychological realism by refusing to provide explanations for his characters’ behavior, Bonello is more interested in subverting expectations of cinema’s relationship to history, defamiliarizing our sense of both the past and the present. His period pieces HOUSE OF PLEASURES (2011) and SAINT LAURENT (2014) took place in such hermetic environments that they seemed to be playing out on space stations, while his contemporary films like NOCTURAMA (2016) and ZOMBI CHILD (2019) incorporate so many allusions to cultural traditions and past works of art they make the present seem forbidding in its own right. Alternating between stories set in 1910, 2014, and 2044, THE BEAST builds on Bonello’s characteristically alienating portraits of the past and the present by adding a healthy dose of future shock. The 2044 narrative concerns a woman named Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) who undergoes a process that will erase her DNA of any negative memories of her past lives, which include being a concert pianist in early 20th century Paris and being an aspiring actress in Obama-era Los Angeles. In Bonello’s chilling vision of the future, AI technology has replaced people in the majority of jobs and much of humanity has been deemed useless; his visions of the recent and less-recent past are no more inviting. As in much of James’ writing, there’s always something in THE BEAST to keep the audience at arm’s length from what the work is about. That distance seems purposeful here—it must be closed with creativity and emotional intuition. (2023, 146 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Teinosuke Kinugasa's A PAGE OF MADNESS (Japan/Silent)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Wednesday, 6pm
Also known as A PAGE OUT OF ORDER or THE CRAZY PAGE, this is, regardless of the title, a madhouse riot of a movie. Traumatic and nauseating, it's easily the most horrifying movie made during the Silent Era, a weird and queasy dance of death directed by former female impersonator/future Oscar and Palme d'Or winner Teinosuke Kinugasa and written by future Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata. Part avant-garde suicide finale, part Lynchian creepshow, this unhinged Japanese contemporary to German Expressionism (a movement A PAGE OF MADNESS's makers were apparently unaware of) would be considered a seminal film if anyone had actually seen it, but it was forgotten and believed lost until the 1970s. The film's simple-yet-somehow-indescribable plot involves a janitor working at the asylum where his wife is a patient. Everything about this movie is borderline insane. (1926, 78 min, DCP Digital) [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]
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Screening as part of "The Art of the Benshi - Night Two," a touring program of silent Japanese films narrated in traditional manner by benshi. Also on this program is a fragment of Harry Williams and Kisaburo Kurihara's 1918 short SANJI GOTO—THE JAPANESE ENOCH ARDEN (35mm), Shozo Makino's 1921 short JIRAIYA THE HERO (21 min, DCP Digital), and Herman C. Raymaker's 1924 short OUR PET (11 min, DCP Digital). PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS PROGRAM AND NIGHT ONE (SCREENING TUESDAY AT 6PM) ARE BOTH SOLD OUT, THOUGH A LIMITED WAITLIST WILL OPEN AT THE BOX OFFICE ONE HOUR BEFORE EACH SCREENING, AT 5PM. More info on the programs here.
Michael Mann’s MIAMI VICE (US) and Kirk Wong’s ORGANIZED CRIME & TRIAD BUREAU (Hong Kong)
Highs & Lows at the Music Box Theatre – Tuesday, 7pm
These two crime dramas are less concerned with giant action set pieces as they are with kinetic visuals and subtlety exploring interpersonal dynamics. Executive producer on the '80s television series, Michael Mann returned to direct MIAMI VICE (2006, 132 min, DCP Digital), starring Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx as Miami-Dade police detectives ‘Sonny’ Crockett and ‘Rico’ Tubbs. Along with their team (which includes Naomie Harris and Justin Theroux, to name a few), the partners are recruited to go undercover as drug smugglers to expose a large transnational crime syndicate. Complicating things is Sonny’s interest in the leader’s accountant and girlfriend, Isabella, played by Gong Li—her performance and their steamy chemistry are highlights. What’s truly noteworthy about MIAMI VICE, however, is its style. Never letting the viewer forget this is the heyday of the flip phone era, the film constantly highlights the technology of the time; Mann shot the film in high-speed digital, giving it a grainy video quality, moving between blurred and clear. It’s a mesmerizingly stunning look that matches the sound mixing, as the sound of traffic and boats overpower dialogue, creating a realistic quality to the soundscape. The dialogue, too, is aesthetic, with a staccato rhythm, the script smart in its reflection of the film’s overall visual design. Receiving mixed reviews upon its release, MIAMI VICE now feels like an action film grounded in its time but in a completely innovative and bold way. The follow up to his Jackie Chan-starring film CRIME STORY, director Kirk Wong’s ORGANIZED CRIME & TRIAD BUREAU (1994, 87 min, 35mm) follows Inspector Lee (Danny Lee), an unorthodox policeman, and his aggressively loyal team as they search for fugitive gang leader, Tung (Anthony Wong), and his own crew. Essentially a cat and mouse story, the film uses similar kinetic camera movement to MIAMI VICE, moving between such diverse shots as close ups and bird’s eye views to provide unique action; an early chase scene features characters in a shoot-out while rolling down a grassy hill. ORGANIZED CRIME also plays with cool and warm tones as both films juxtapose the cityscapes with beach-side set scenes. It’s also a film more interested in the multifaceted relationships between characters, not just the police and the criminals, but internally within each group. Much like Isabella in MIAMI VICE, Tung’s mistress, Cindy (Cecilia Yip), has a complex, tragic backstory which drives not just their relationship but her own personal resolve. Sponsored by Hopewell Brewing. [Megan Fariello]
Kinuyo Tanaka’s THE MOON HAS RISEN (Japan)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Thursday, 7pm
Yasujiro Ozu cowrote this upper-middle-class comedy of manners in 1947; when actress-turned-director Kinuyo Tanaka was later given the opportunity to direct it, he gave her his full support. THE MOON HAS RISEN resembles many of the postwar masterpieces Ozu directed in its elliptical plotting, understated pathos, and thematic focus on family and marriage. Chishu Ryu, Ozu’s favorite actor, even gets top billing, despite the fact that he appears in the film relatively little. He plays the widowed father of two daughters and one son; the son is deceased, though, per Japanese custom, his widow continues to live with his extended family. The story, which is sometimes reminiscent of Jane Austen’s Emma, centers on Ryu’s younger daughter’s efforts to set up her older sister with a family friend while he’s in town on a business trip; there are also digressions about most of the other principal characters. The surface tone is generally light—the film plays, for the most part, like a bright romantic comedy—yet this betrays how troubling and morbid the script is. Consider the cubist-like structure: the family almost never appears altogether in the same scene, and rarely is anyone introduced directly, so just figuring out how everyone’s connected is like solving a puzzle. (On first viewing, I mistakenly thought that Ryu’s daughter-in-law was a second domestic servant.) Consider, too, how the film withholds information about the deaths in the family until near the end; only then does it become clear how much of the onscreen behavior was borne out of mourning. This is the kind of complexity that Ozu specialized in, and one thing that makes THE MOON HAS RISEN so special is that it provides a record of how another filmmaker—and one of the only Japanese woman filmmakers of the postwar era, no less—would interpret that complexity. Tanaka doesn’t try to replicate Ozu’s exquisite visual style; her approach is earthier, more actor-driven, almost Renoir-esque. Her directorial presence also comes through in the three-dimensional performances from the women in the cast, which includes Tanaka herself as the family’s gullible maid. This was the second feature that Tanaka directed, though the Directors’ Guild of Japan still considered it inappropriate that she should be allowed to direct on her own; the Guild receives a special credit for “supervising” the production. Screening as part of the series Kinuyo Tanaka, Actress and Auteur. (1955, 102 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED
David Fincher's PANIC ROOM (US)
Music Box Theatre – Friday and Saturday, Midnight
The home invasion subgenre is one of the most durable in horror and thriller films, and it certainly will stay that way until the day we all start living in bio-pods. Many have been made and continue to be made, but David Fincher’s PANIC ROOM may be the key home invasion film for the 21st century, riddled as it is with post-9/11 anxiety about the limited promise of new technology to protect the homestead. The first night after Meg (Jodie Foster) and her daughter Sarah (Kristen Stewart in her first principal role) move into a new home on short notice following Meg’s divorce from her husband, the home is targeted by burglars expecting the unit to be empty. With the sleazy Junior (Jared Leto) leading the pack, creepy Raoul (Dwight Yoakam) and the more gentle, conflicted Burnham (Forest Whitaker) break into the home looking to steal bearer bonds still stashed in the house from the previous owner, Junior’s grandfather. As the men realize the house is inhabited, the women retreat to the home’s titular panic room, locked into a steel-and-concrete box with a surveillance view of the increasingly frantic men as they try to break through. Up until THE KILLER (2023), this was probably the most concentrated Fincher, a director whose best and worst quality is his lean yet meticulously planned execution of his scripts. Fincher’s notorious perfectionism is evident even in the film’s relatively simple single setting, with every corner of the house receiving equal play in elaborately considered tracking shots. Though a skilled technician above everything, Fincher is a true modernist, always depicting his characters reconciling their humanity against the frontier of industrial development. The mass media of ZODIAC (2007), the nascent social media of THE SOCIAL NETWORK (2010), and the gig economy of THE KILLER all provide some thematic grist in their respective films, but here his social concerns are more subtle: the more mixed promise of new security gadgets (and, to a lesser extent, real estate loopholes) that trap our characters in a modern hell represented by a beautiful home, the ultimate in both sentimental and monetary value. PANIC ROOM is a quintessential home invasion movie particularly because the home is given such care (the house and its entire city block were built from scratch on a soundstage to Fincher’s specs); though cliche to say, the house is truly its own character in the film, a neutral labyrinth working against both good guys and bad. The single setting and restricted cast calls to mind theater, and the film’s stacked roster, cast for maximum nobility or skeeviness respectively, all sell their respective characters (Whitaker especially) to texture the thrills. But the thrills, of course, are why we’re here, and Fincher delivers them in spades with the clean concision of the film’s descriptive-yet-evocative title. If nothing else, this simple film is also a reminder of better, simpler times, when you could sit down to watch a movie and count on something awful happening to Jared Leto. (2002, 111 min, 35mm) [Maxwell Courtright]
Joan Micklin Silver’s CROSSING DELANCEY (US)
Music Box Theatre – Sunday, 11:30am
If movies could tuck you into bed and tell you everything is going to be alright, this would be one to do it. Like a Jewish grandmother who says the wisest thing you’ve ever heard one moment and puts her teeth in a glass of Schnapps the next, Joan Micklin Silver’s CROSSING DELANCEY is that perfect, don’t-make-’em-like-they-used-to mix of warm and humorous, sensible in its astuteness of life’s compromises but nevertheless spectacular in its swoon-worthy romance. Amy Irving stars as Izzy, a single, 30-something woman in New York City who works at a storied Manhattan bookstore where she rubs elbows with the city’s literary elite. She’s looking for love, of course, mostly in all the wrong places; the film opens with Izzy having her eye on a pretentious Dutch writer who’s estranged from his wife and employs a young assistant-cum-girlfriend. The signals are, invariably, mixed. At the same time, though, a matchmaker friend of her beloved bubbe (played by Yiddish stage star Reizl Bozyk in her only film role) sets her up with a nice Jewish man, Sam (Peter Riegert, a few years after LOCAL HERO); he’s handsome, unattached, and even runs his own business, a pickle shop on the Lower East Side. Izzy spends much of the film going between the two men, one a European intellectual, the other a regular (albeit very handsome) schmuck, the stark difference between them begging questions of which milieu she really belongs to. We catch glimpses of her own life, with a smattering of friends and their accompanying neuroses, and a passion for literature that doesn’t necessarily extend into her own creative pursuits but is noble even so. I’d be lying if I said the film, adapted by Susan Sandler from her play of the same name, was a feminist masterpiece; but it undoubtedly centers on a woman and the pursuit of what she wants, even if that is the stability of a heterosexual partnership. And what’s wrong with that? In one particularly felicitous scene, Izzy leaves the apartment of the man who it’s revealed to have wanted her to replace his former assistant (I’ll let you guess which one); he cries out to her, lying, “I felt a kinship!” She replies, aptly, “You felt an administrative need!” The man to whom she turns (again, just guess!) has long admired her from afar and makes no show of wanting her for any reason other than who she is as a person. It’s he who dispenses the piece of wisdom from which the play and film get its name, recalling a story to Izzy of a man who, upon losing the little brown hat he usually wore, crossed Delancey Street to get another kind of hat, which managed to change not only his outlook on life but how he related to others. The suggestion is that perhaps Izzy has options previously unbeknownst to her, that perhaps the modern life she’s undertaken has prevented her from seeing the Old World way of life that, while she may not want to embrace it entirely, she still may see some value in appreciating. And again, what’s wrong with that? Maybe it’s possible to embrace new-world independence with some Old World lovin’. Maybe that’s what it might mean to have it all. When Micklin Silver had trouble getting the film financed, Steven Spielberg, who was married to Irving at the time, took it to Warner Brothers on her behalf. Another interesting piece of trivia is that Frasier’s David Hyde Pierce appears as one of Izzy’s colleagues at the bookstore. In addition to the charming romance I also swooned over the urban mise-en-scène and the fantastic, late-80s dark academia fits. Hosted by Open Books. (1988, 97 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]
Ayoka Chenzira's ALMA'S RAINBOW (US)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Monday, 7pm
While all Black filmmakers need more recognition, independent producer, director, and animator Ayoka Chenzira has been particularly in need of rediscovery. Visual media have been made richer by her focus on developing stories of Black life and educating the next generation of Black filmmakers, including her daughter HaJ, her collaborator on HERadventure, an online, interactive fantasy film posted on Chenzira’s website and YouTube channel. Now, Academy Film Archive, The Film Foundation, and Milestone Films have produced a 4K restoration of her only feature film, ALMA’S RAINBOW, in which a teenage girl, her mother, and her aunt all come of age in different ways. Rainbow Gold (Victoria Gabrielle Platt) is a tomboy whose hip-hop dance crew comes apart as her two male partners become more interested in chasing girls than in rehearsing. Her mother, Alma (Kim Weston-Moran), gave up her sister singing act to make a living for the two of them by opening a beauty salon in the Brooklyn home she inherited from their mother. On the tenth anniversary of the founding of Alma’s salon, her long-absent sister, Ruby (Mizan Nunes Kirby), returns. Rainbow is fascinated with her flamboyant, larger-than-life aunt and hopes to follow in her footsteps as a singer-dancer, setting up a clash between Ruby and Alma, who wants Rainbow to seek a secure future. ALMA’S RAINBOW is itself a festive rainbow of color and community, loaded with discrete scenes loaded with humor and humanity. The beauty salon (Chenzira has spent large chunks of her creative life making films about hair) is the wonderful gathering place for the neighborhood women, all of whom are deeply involved in getting the all-business Alma together with Blue (Lee Dobson), a handyman who clearly is sweet on her. Another plot point is Alma’s work for William B. Underdo III (Sydney Best), the local undertaker who funded her business and would like more than a professional relationship with her. His mint-condition classic car says so much about his character as a respectable older man who, like Alma, just needs to let his hair down. The one character who has no trouble letting loose, Ruby, provides the manic energy that shakes up the Golds’ straitened life while revealing her almost desperate restlessness. Her flamboyant costumes contrast the darkly rich wood and traditional furnishings of Alma’s home and the funeral home where a smitten Underdo allows her to perform “Beautiful Blackness in the Sky,” a rather morbid song written by Chenzira, for her family that is a uniquely weird experience. The excellent score by Jean-Paul Bourelly mixes jazz and contemporary sounds in much the same way that cinematographer Ronald K. Gray intersperses sexy dream sequences and black-and-white memories with the bright, crisp present. In the end, all of the Gold women confront themselves and their desires for a truly satisfying multigenerational coming-of-age story. Screening as part of Apparitions: An Assemblage of Black Independent Films. (1994, 85 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Nicholas Ray's THE LUSTY MEN (US)
Comfort Film at Comfort Station (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave.) – Wednesday, 8pm
A bare synopsis of THE LUSTY MEN makes it sounds like a standard-issue sports movie: a head-strong wannabe with dreams of fame and fortune, a grizzled veteran itching to get back in the game, a love triangle that threatens everything inside and outside the stadium. Much of the rodeo footage comes from stock shots so poorly integrated that they may as well be kinescope discards. The screenplay is functional and nothing more, chiefly notable for its power to inculcate the audience with the conviction that 'rodeo' is a verb as much as a noun. And yet I know no one who has failed to come away from THE LUSTY MEN reporting anything less than total emotional devastation. THE LUSTY MEN possesses the power to inspire great and unassailable personal devotion. I once hung a lobby card for THE LUSTY MEN in my office and anybody who had ever seen the film remarked upon it automatically. Since the studio has no print of THE LUSTY MEN in circulation and there's still no DVD on the market, I've spent an unhealthy amount of time mentally cataloging the whereabouts of four 35mm prints I know to be extant; the worn-but-watchable 16mm print screened by Doc has its own accumulated history, having been acquired by the student film group decades ago in its first flush of auteurist fervor. I detail all this not for good trivia, but because THE LUSTY MEN itself exudes an anguished fragility. Attribute that to the sensitive direction of Nicholas Ray or the heart-aching performances of Robert Mitchum, Arthur Kennedy, and, yes, Susan Hayward. Either way, it's a movie under perpetual threat of floating away, or perhaps of becoming one with the dirt. Lee Garmes's cinematography, one of the movie's major assets, captures trailer parks and dance halls with an unfussy solidity; they're present-tense ruins for a trio of stubborn ghosts. A Film Programmer Mentorship screening, programmed by Jack Miller. (1952, 114 min, Digital Projection) [K.A. Westphal]
Michael Mann's HEAT (US)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm and Sunday, 4pm
By 1995, Michael Mann was already one of the most formally accomplished directors of modern Hollywood. His TV series Miami Vice brought a new style to the police procedure genre: streamlined, fixated on technological detail, and coolly—even inhumanly—detached from its characters. His previous theatrical features, MANHUNTER (1986) and THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS (1992), married these qualities to a rich visual language that drew from centuries of American painting. But HEAT was a new breakthrough: the introduction of a relentlessly inquisitive film style, willing to sacrifice focus and even spatial orientation in order to capture the most stimulating detail of any given moment. Mann's gifts as a visual artist would be superficial, though, if he weren't so thoroughly educated in his subject matter. The obsessiveness of Al Pacino's Lt. Vincent Hanna in arresting a master thief was inspired by one of Mann's friends in the Chicago Police Department; and equally important to the film's power is the near-documentary explication of almost every bit of surveillance equipment and artillery we see. (As in his later COLLATERAL [2004] and MIAMI VICE [2006], Mann had much of the cast undergo professional weapons training before production.) Mann's eternal subject is the shark-like grace of the career professional; this film conveys, in an epic accumulation of detail, the challenge of keeping up with him. It also reflects on the professional's struggle in keeping up with himself. Pacino's Hanna and Robert DeNiro's Neil McCauley (Hanna's criminal doppelgänger) are similar cases of middle-aged regret, worn down by decades of living by professional code, but Mann never paints them schematically. This isn't a film about the futility of law and order, but the codependence between law and crime. It's also an awe-inspiring portrait of contemporary Los Angeles, as striking a postmodern (in the architectural sense) piece of art as any of Antonioni's '60s films. Screening as part of the Board Picks series. (1995, 171 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Jim Muro’s STREET TRASH (US)
FACETS Cinema – Saturday, 9pm
The first time I remember seeing someone else's penis I was around 12 years old. I was at a sleepover at Fred Rojas' house. He and I were total horror hounds at the time, systematically working our way through every horror VHS at Lion Video—his local mom & pop video store in a strangely desolate strip mall in the blue-collar suburb of Mundelein, IL. And even though we had loaded up on the store's 5 movies for 5 days for 5 dollars deal, we still stopped everything that night to watch our favorite show, Drive-In Reviews. This short-lived show on Comedy Central ran late at night from 1993-1994 and was a mashup of Siskel & Ebert and Mystery Science Theatre 3000. In each episode the hosts would review 3 horror or exploitation movies, show clips, and riff on them. I don't remember any finer details about this show whatsoever, except that it's where I first learned about STREET TRASH. The clip they decided on showing was of the infamous penis scene. Watching that, and the soul shattering shock I received, has been burned into my brain as a core memory. This was my 9/11 until, well, actual 9/11. Not only had I never seen an adult male penis before, but I had never seen one like this. Still haven't. To be honest, I hope I never do. It took me at least a decade and a half to finally track down a copy of STREET TRASH and actually watch it. It turned out that my memory was crystal clear—for better or worse. It's hard to describe STREET TRASH without sounding hyperbolic. It's offensive by design. Filled with such incredibly casual sexual assault, racism, sexism, classism, and a plot hinged on all of that, it seems strange to call this a comedy. But it is. It's a gross out, groan out loud, none-more-black comedy for people who can put their conscience and good taste on pause for an hour and a half and just let go. The premise itself is deliciously awful: A lowlife liquor store owner finds a mysterious case of a booze named Viper in the wall of his establishment. Looking to make a quick buck off the local alcoholic homeless camp, he prices Viper at a too-good-to-be true price. Unfortunately for everyone (except the audience) Viper is so toxic that it makes whomever drinks it literally melt. The film follows two homeless brothers who live in a used tire fort in a junkyard as they try to survive both the spread of Viper deaths and the psychotic Bronson—a sadistic Vietnam vet who violently rules the junkyard with his fellow vet henchman while wielding a dagger made from the bone of a human leg that he took as a war trophy. The movie pulls no punches, plays the vile for laughter, and is in the poorest taste possible. The rub? It's one of the most beautiful looking films I've ever seen. Again, I really do understand how hyperbolic all this sounds. First-time director Jim Muro use of camera and color are nothing short of inspired. To say this about a movie that falls into the childishly named exploitation sub-genre known as "melt movies" seems ridiculous, but his sweeping camerawork makes the urine-soaked gutters of New York look as epic and grand as any field in a Terrence Malick film. I know I sound as insane as the dirt-covered scuzzbags featured in STREET TRASH, but I'm far from the only one who was startlingly impressed with Muro's camerawork, his Steadicam work especially. This film must have made its way around Hollywood because within a few years he ended up being almost every big-name Hollywood director's go-to Steadicam/Panaglide cam operator for multiple works. His credits include THE ABYSS, DANCES WITH WOLVES, LA CONFIDENTIAL, HEAT, CLUELESS, and CASINO—and, of course, his heroic year of 1991 where he did THE DOORS, TERMINATOR 2, POINT BREAK, and JFK. To have such a dumb, knuckle-dragging, disgusting exercise of poor taste such as STREET TRASH be made by such a visual talent is a confluence of events that could never have been expected. But thank god it was. This very likely will be the most gorgeous gross-out film you'll ever see. The garish use of brilliant, non-human color as gore tips it from a derivative, blood-soaked body horror film into a truly cartoonish display of disgust. There's a wholesomely classic Three Stooges/Looney Tunes level of slapstick at play here that completely belies the fact that you feel like you can smell every single person that appears on screen. The truly masterful use of the camera and mise-en-scène (again, I know it's weird to talk like this about a movie called STREET TRASH) fully immerses you in the film in a way that defies the narrative material. Most exploitation films simply focus on the exploitation, the titillation. STREET TRASH gives you all that, but also wants you to know that the filmmakers aren't a bunch of common gutter trash sleaze merchants; rather they are dignified and artistically minded gutter trash sleaze merchants. This movie isn't for everybody. Hell, this movie isn't really for anybody. Yet for nearly 40 years, STREET TRASH has steadily found itself an audience. Yes, they might be (and probably are) the exact kind of slimeball degenerates that you see on the screen in the film, but hey, even gutter trash deserves to look up into the sky and see the beauty of the stars every now and again. Except in this case the stars are melting, exploding homeless people. Que sera, sera. (1987, 101 min, Blu-ray Projection) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
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Screening as part of a SUPER HORROR-RAMA! triple feature of melt-obsessed movies with Robert Fuest’s 1975 film THE DEVIL’S RAIN (85 min, Blu-ray Projection) at 5pm and William Sachs’ 1977 film THE INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN (84 min, Blu-ray Projection) at 7pm. Attendees will receive a creepy candle with every ticket, and FACETS will have a horror pop-up market, drink specials, and giveaways between the films. Also include brand new animated ad galleries by Bill Van Ryn of Drive-In Asylum. Sponsored by the House of Monsters and programmed by Evenlyn Spear. More info here.
Sofia Coppola's MARIE ANTOINETTE (US)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Tuesday, 7pm
The punchy beats of Gang of Four's "Natural's Not in It" opens this feminist retelling of Marie Antoinette's rise to teen queendom. With an aesthetic that is as yummy as it is indulgent, with bright pastels and gilded decor, Sofia Coppola departs from her somber directing style to make something more rebellious and creative. The initial shot of Kirsten Dunst as Antoinette sees her lying on a chaise lounge while a maid fits her with a shoe. With an air of boredom, she takes a lick of cake (she’s surrounded by cake) before noticing the camera’s gaze, then gives us a face that smirkingly asks, “What are you looking at?” In MARIE ANTOINETTE, Coppola seemingly sidesteps matters of the French Revolution to capture a more intimate and personal herstory of an adolescent girl attempting to fulfill a position of arbitrary divine right. The narrative begins with the arranged marriage of Antoinette and Louis XVI, then shifts to focus on their inability to secure an heir and establish a "Franco-Austrian" alliance. Pressure weighs on Antoinette from her mother and her aristocratic social life. "All eyes will be on you." Often employing a shaky, almost documentary realism, the camera notices the delicate details of her isolation and the awkwardness of the couple's participation in royal customs, a nuance not seen in many historical period dramas with the exception of maybe AMADEUS (1984). With historical accuracy such as accents thrown out the window, Dunst and the rest of the cast, including Rip Torn and Rose Byrne, are excellent. Jason Schwartzman plays the soon-to-be King with a quiet discomfort and timidness that I really enjoyed, seemingly more concerned with his own myopic interests than sexual, or political, relations. Unable to produce a child, the young bride steadily indulges in the lavish affordances of royalty. New shoes, custom clothing, desserts and champagne fill the void, as she attempts to gain some semblance of her own identity in France. Meshed with the movie is a score intended to evince Antoinette's subsequent debauchery and teenage angst, which consultant Brian Reitzell described as a "post-punk-pre-new-romantic-rock opera odyssey with some 18th century music." While this disparate mix of 2000s indie, classical, and post-punk can feel a bit gimmicky at times—or even trite in the case of a conspicuous consumption montage set to "I Want Candy"—the soundtrack provides notable subtext. Eventually Antoinette bears children with Louis XVI and finally finds solace at her Petit Trianon, where the director presents her maturation as a mother in a very primal light. Near the end of the film, she is seen spending most of her time in the garden with her daughter, wearing flowers and neutral tones, and contemplating the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau; however, this doesn't change her outcome or the resulting demise of the French monarchy. As the daughter of a renowned Hollywood king, it makes sense that Sofia Coppola would take such pleasure in humanizing a figure whose notorious condemnation was largely based on sexism. With a playful wink, Coppola provides a much-needed female perspective to the story. Screening as part of the Americans in Paris: After the Dance series. (2006, 123 min, DCP Digital) [Nic Denelle]
Ryan Martin Brown’s FREE TIME (US)
Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
Valiantly taking the baton from the likes of Robert Altman, Elaine May, Albert Brooks, Noah Baumbach, and Andrew Bujalski, Ryan Martin Brown has crafted a delightful, lo-fi, casual-but-committed work of indie comedy filmmaking, tackling big themes in small rooms, and low stakes with high-wire characters. Brown’s noxious protagonist Drew (Colin Burgess, in a comic performance equally endearing and frustrating) finds himself a bit out of step with the world; he’s just quit his crummy data analyst job but has no sense of direction beyond the general youthful malaise that comes with, understandably, despising corporate America. He has friends, or rather, people who are willing to meet up with him to grab a quick smoothie, but he barely knows how to engage in any kind of meaningful human conversation. In a society systematically structured around your job being your life, Drew seems all-at-once determined to break this rule, yet he's disturbingly inept at trying to grasp at what else is out there for him. Perhaps the most tragic realization comes deep into the film; the one non-corporatized tenet of Drew’s life‚ his own artistic pursuits as a keyboard player in a burgeoning Brooklyn band—is, frankly, mediocre at best, especially as he fails to adapt to the lead singer’s new direction for the band (Drew’s disturbed reaction to his Brooklyn indie band pivoting to country music is one of many endearingly witty tangents in a film full of meandering minds in the youth of the 2020s). Even the one "win" Drew finds along the way—a mid-film makeout session after a serendipitous meet-cute—is squandered by his incessant desire to push his music on anyone and everyone around him, yet another rejection of the here and now to aspire to a grindset mindset. Drew is full of ambition with nowhere to throw it, all talk and no action, fully personified in all his awkward glory. With such a slice-of-life premise threatening to run in circles for it’s already-brief, less-than-ninety-minute runtime, Brown effortlessly shifts things into a gear of semi-absurdity, taking Drew’s solo quest for anti-capitalist rebellion and letting that virus spread amongst a similar class of fed-up young men who’ve similarly had it with the system. It’s a welcome piece of elevated comedy in what’s otherwise still a promising piece of bleak-yet-bright comic antics, Drew’s journey receiving an ending that anyone experiencing the dread of fighting against late-stage capitalism might suspect is coming. For those who think the old adage “there are no atheists in a fox hole” doesn’t apply to them, may I suggest “there are no anti-capitalists in a cafe where you can’t afford an almond croissant”? (2023, 78 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
Alison O’Daniel’s THE TUBA THIEVES (US)
Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
Years ago, through a workmate who was losing his hearing, I got involved in the deaf community in Chicago. I attended parties that lacked music and verbal conversation, and the occasional collision of flesh and bones from energetic signing were the only sounds I heard. The experiences were disorienting, but in fact, I wasn’t listening closely enough. Alison O’Daniel makes it clear in THE TUBA THIEVES that sound is everywhere if we tune into it—wind ruffling paper on our desks, air-conditioning units kicking on, birds singing as we sit on a park bench, and the much more damaging sounds of low-flying airplanes and the never-ending stream of traffic on our massive highways. This film offers a series of vignettes both documentary and staged set almost entirely in the Los Angeles area. O’Daniel, who identifies as deaf/hard of hearing, uses the character of Nyke (Nyeisha Prince), a regally beautiful Black woman who is deaf, as our guide through a kind of story that runs through the many disparate parts of THE TUBA THIEVES. The titular crooks (played by actors) who actually did steal dozens of tubas and other musical equipment from high schools in largely underresourced Latino areas, don’t get any more screen time than most of the people in the film—a deaf zambino driver, Nyke’s deaf lover, hearing narcocorrida musicians, hearing rock musicians playing at a deaf club to writhing young people and old card players literally deaf and seemingly blind to the action behind them. One apt reenactment was the 1952 premiere of John Cage’s 4’33” in Woodstock, New York. Even then, the lack of music does not mean a lack of sound. O’Daniel’s comprehensive, ever-present captioning alerts us to the click and tick of Cage’s stopwatch and the opening and closing of the piano’s keyboard cover. We even learn that Prince made a stop on his Purple Rain tour at Gallaudet University, the best-known educational institution for deaf people in the United States. If anything is to be gleaned from this experimental and experiential film aside from the fact that noise pollution is worse than we know, it’s that sound is for everyone, even those who can’t hear it. O’Daniel in attendance at the Friday and Saturday screenings. (2023, 93 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
George A. Romero's DAWN OF THE DEAD (US)
Alamo Drafthouse (3519 N. Clark St., Suite C301) – Friday & Saturday, 9:30pm and Tuesday, 7:30pm
Writing about DAWN OF THE DEAD on first release, Dave Kehr likened George A. Romero to Jonathan Swift, highlighting the fierce moral vision behind the writer-director’s grisly social satire. This comparison isn’t inapt—the bluntness with which characters in DAWN confront matters of life and death might remind you of “A Modest Proposal”—but I think Mark Twain is a closer point of reference. Like Twain, Romero worked in a wholly American idiom; his best films are independent-minded, tough, and colloquial. They’re also bracingly democratic: DAWN OF THE DEAD, for instance, provides one of cinema’s greatest capitalist fantasies (the heroes get to enjoy an entire shopping mall to themselves) as well as one of its greatest anticapitalist jokes (pace Kehr, the film equates wholesale shopping with wholesale slaughter). It would be short-sighted, however, to claim the film endorses a particular stance toward capitalism, as what makes DAWN endure as art is the gracefulness with which Romero moves between different philosophical positions based on what the situations necessitate. Indeed, few films render so palpable the challenge of maintaining your morality when you’re struggling to survive. Romero’s ability to juggle complex moral issues with deftly executed violence and off-the-cuff humor is never less than exhilarating; moreover, he imagines the film’s apocalyptic American landscape so vividly that DAWN would be a masterpiece for the immersive storytelling alone. Thanks to Romero’s Twain-like feel for all-American faces and spaces, the environment is eerily, funnily similar to the one we already inhabit. In addition to the shopping mall, the memorable settings include a housing project and a small-time TV news studio; the cast, bereft of movie stars, resembles people you’d see on the street. The film’s anonymous qualities are thrown into relief by Tom Savini’s highly imaginative makeup and gore effects, which remain the gold standard for the genre. (1979, 127 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Alice Rohrwacher’s LA CHIMERA (Italy/France/Switzerland)
Block Cinema (at Northwestern University), Gene Siskel Film Center, & Music Box Theatre – Thursday, 6:30pm (Block) [Free Admission]; See Venue websites for showtimes (Film Center and Music Box)
For Arthur, there’s little that separates the living from the dead. Played by a steely, towering Josh O’Connor, most often seen sidling through scenes donning a detritus-laden white linen suit, he spends his days wandering about with his merry band of "tombaroli," pilfering the tombs hidden beneath their feet across Italy, raiding a myriad of resting places for long-lost Etruscan treasures that, in their eyes, aren’t doing the dead any good just sitting about. Arthur’s mind wanders about, too, to his long-lost love Beniamina, a figure seen in flickers, dreamlike, perhaps also sitting in that nebulous zone between what we know is gone but what we wish was still here. Indeed, our first glimpse of Arthur is of him riding a train back home after the end of his prison sentence, his own resurrection back into the land of the "living." Alice Rohrwacher’s film tends to navigate various planes of existence, often changing aspect ratios, film stocks, even genres; the story curves through tropes found in heist thrillers, comedies, and romances, employing techniques found within the realms of silent film, experimental essay, and documentary filmmaking. Her collage of storytelling ends up falling somewhere—spiritually and thematically—between a fairy tale and a ghost story, weighing the love of the present with the love of that which is long past, of building your life in deference to death, of weighing one’s soul against the thrill of unearthing objects not meant for human eyes. Arthur himself is gifted with an otherworldly spirit of divining, of knowing in his very soul where these underground treasures lie, with Rohrwacher’s camera literally performing revolutions to find Arthur in another visual plane, familiar yet upside-down. What a gift to find a film so brimming with passion, humor, and otherworldly desire brimming from every frame for those curious enough to pull on the threads Rohrwacher leaves lying before us. Perhaps a glimmer of light will shine through after all that digging. (2023, 130 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
Krzysztof Kieslowski's THREE COLORS: BLUE (France)
Alamo Drafthouse (3519 N. Clark St., Suite C301) – Sunday, 1:45pm
In THREE COLORS: BLUE, the first in his French flag-inspired trilogy, Krzysztof Kieslowski puts forward the radical notion that liberty—here connected, like the later WHITE and RED (both 1994), with France’s national motto, “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité”—can be attained through loss. Juliette Binoche stars as Julie, a young woman who loses both her husband and young daughter in a car accident at the beginning of the film. Rather than piece her life back together after surviving the tragedy, she decides to leave it all behind, devoid of anything from her previous life except the blue crystal chandelier from her daughter's bedroom. Her husband was a famous composer (though it’s implied that Julie actually wrote his music, or at least helped more than anyone knew), and pieces of his last, unfinished symphony—a concert for the reunification of Europe—haunt her at particularly blue (pun intended) moments. She’s unable to fully escape her past, however, in large part because of that music. She’s pursued by a shrewd journalist and an eager public, both curious about her husband’s final work, as well as his creative partner, who’s in love with her. (Then there’s the weight of her husband’s secrets, which, naturally, include a mistress.) Compelling as the narrative is, it’s Julie’s vacuousness, realized exquisitely by Binoche, that resounds most beautifully. Grief is an inherently cinematic emotion—or, rather, a range of emotions brought about by some sort of drama, the action and aesthetic of which (e.g., the build to a devastating car crash, a somber funeral broadcast on television, two coffins: one big, the other small, etc.) make for compelling cinema. In BLUE, however, referred to as an anti-tragedy just as WHITE and RED are referred to as an anti-comedy and an anti-romance, respectively, Kieslowski cuts it off at the quick, allowing for only said external indulgences before beginning to interiorize Julie’s mourning. In concert with Binoche’s stunning performance, he employs a series of clever tricks to make such scenes understandable to an audience otherwise severed from Julie’s inner dialogue, namely his conceptual use of the French tricolor (mostly blue), musical interludes that signify her preoccupation with the unfinished score, and blunt fade-outs meant to indicate a lapse in focus rather than a shot change or scene transition. Throughout the trilogy as a whole, Kieslowski succeeds in humanizing the symbolism behind the flag’s complicated ideals, but, with BLUE, the canny motifs do not entirely blunt the piercing idea that only without emotional ties one can truly be free. (1993, 100 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
George McCowan's FROGS (US)
FACETS Cinema – Friday, 9pm
Three years before Steven Spielberg's cash cow of a killer shark burst onto the scene, another American epic about vicious animals attacking hubristic Americans on the Fourth of July improbably made its way into theaters across the nation. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who prefers the amphibian antics of George McCowan’s eco-horror film FROGS over the popcorn theatrics of JAWS (1975), but there are still thrills to be had with this relic of 1970s horror filmmaking. McCowan’s particular brand of "Man Vs. Nature" storytelling finds itself off the coast of Florida, the swamp air practically emanating from every frame, with greenery devouring the atmosphere where the wealthy, aging Jason Crockett (Ray MIlland) has built a destination mansion smack dab in the middle of natural swamp territory, poisoning and polluting his cold-blooded neighbors to the point where revenge is all but expected. A youthful Sam Elliott arrives as a nature photographer, the only voice of reason speaking on behalf of Mother Nature amidst a cast of vapid socialites who find themselves picked off one by one by the viscous fauna. Despite what one might glean from what is a particularly frank title, the frogs themselves aren’t the actual forefront of vicious murder throughout this holiday celebration. They act more as guardians of the land, resting on the sidelines, akin to being the mafiosi of the swampland, having the lizards and snakes do their horrid business for them. But these green folks are never far from sight, hopping across the frame in close-up photography that gloriously captures every scale and patch of slime imaginable. Even if they rarely lay a webbed foot upon a soon-to-be-dispatched soul, their presence is ever felt within the sound design, barely a scene existing without a chorus of ribbits coloring the background. Les Baxter’s score, especially, exists as a cacophony of instrumentation, almost like the band is croaking across the soundscape of the motion picture, ensuring that every note of this film leaves us hopping mad. (1972, 91 mins, Blu-ray Projection) [Ben Kaye]
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Screening as part of an Eco-Horror Double Feature with Yoshimitsu Banno’s 1971 film GODZILLA VS. THE SMOG MONSTER (85 min, DCP Digital) at 7pm. All attendees will receive a free reptile or amphibian (not a real one, per FACETS’ website), and FACETS will have a horror pop-up market, drink specials, and giveaways between the films. Presented by the team behind FACETS’ SUPER-HORROR-RAMA! series. Sponsored by the House of Monsters and programmed by Barry Kaufman. More info here.
Ben Kolak’s CAT CITY (US/Documentary)
Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts (915 E. 60th St.) – Friday, 7pm [Free Admission]
When I see a cat on the street, my first thought is “Aw!” My second thought is “I love you.” And my third thought is “I must take you home.” Nowhere in this thought process do I consider anything about that cat’s place within a complicated urban ecosystem; beyond the big eyes, antennae-like ears, long whiskers, soft fur, little feet—I’m getting carried away—are considerations far larger than the incessant cuteness of just one of nature’s most glorious creatures. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll never stop loving cats of all types, sizes and environments, but there’s something to be said about fully understanding the nuances of Chicago’s feral cat population. Ben Kolak’s documentary does a good job addressing the issue from all sides, starting with a progressive 2007 ordinance that allows people to care for feral cats by becoming caretakers and encouraging ‘TNR’: trapping, neutering, and releasing them back on the streets. While an interviewee in the film observes that animal advocacy is often a plight of affluent white women, Kolak turns this assumption on its head and focuses instead on people from marginalized communities, such as a woman with physical disabilities who’s made taking care of cats her vocation and various community members from the city’s South and West sides. They’re all cat colony caretakers, who have gone through the process of becoming registered with the city to care for cat populations in their neighborhoods, taking on the responsibility of providing food and water as well as vaccinating, undertaking the TNR process, and providing medical care as needed. In a way, the cat communities and the human communities that care for them reflect one another, showing how vulnerable populations work together from other communities to survive. Tension comes into play when Kolak introduces the birding community, first highlighting some problems specific to birds (like birds colliding into skyscraper windows) and then the impact that the outdoor cat population, technically an invasive species, has on them. Some go as far as to think that feral cats should be exterminated in order to protect the bird population; the average person is likely to come out of this with more questions than answers, the inherent enigma of nature just as perplexing when applied to urban ecosystems. The film takes a KEDI-like approach in featuring many of the cats as characters, with names like Topcat, Diego, Frida, Hip-Hop, and Princess, a charming quality that emphasizes the human-like complexity of the animals’ dynamics amongst themselves and with humans. The footage of the cats and birds is impressive, and the graphics used to convey facts and map out locations across Chicago where these people and animals live are tasteful. All told, it’s an edifying journey for cat lovers, nature lovers, and city dwellers alike, with plenty to amuse and ponder. Followed by a panel discussion and Q&A. (2023, 79 min, Digital Projection) [Kat Sachs]
Tran Anh Hung's THE TASTE OF THINGS (France/Belgium)
FACETS Cinema – Sunday, 2pm and 5pm
Tran Anh Hung’s seventh feature, THE TASTE OF THINGS, has a lot in common with his first, THE SCENT OF GREEN PAPAYA (1993), despite the fact that the newer film takes place in late 19th-century France and the earlier one took place in 1950s Vietnam. Both are hermetic movies (sometimes even comfortingly so), with most of the action restricted to the main character’s home/workplace; this walled-in quality makes the drama feel insulated from any larger historical forces that exist beyond the frame. In GREEN PAPAYA, the Vietnam War provides an obvious structuring absence (the film ends just a few years before the United States started sending “military advisors” to the country), while in TASTE the looming threat seems to be the entire range of political, social, and industrial upheavals that came with the dawn of the 20th century. In neither film, however, does the exterior threat eclipse the onscreen narrative, as Tran’s exquisite mise-en-scène (which was already superb in GREEN PAPAYA and has gotten lovelier over time) lures you further and further inward. Though these are quiet films, they’re rarely still; when there isn’t movement within the frame, Tran creates it through subtle pans and tracking shots. His style is most rapturous when he’s depicting domestic rituals, particularly cooking, as he presents seemingly routine activities as whirlpools of little events. Most of the first act of TASTE OF THINGS concerns the creation of a gourmet meal, and Tran renders the process so enveloping that you may wish the entire movie was about the characters preparing food. Yet these early scenes—which, like those of GREEN PAPAYA, feature a tween girl as an audience identification figure—exhibit a progressively rich sense of character; through cooking rituals, stray lines of dialogue, and impeccable body language, the principal characters come into focus. Dodin (Benoît Magimel) is a renowned restaurateur, and Eugénie (Juliette Binoche) is his head chef of 20 years. Their relationship is warm and mutually supportive, but it is chiefly professional. Only when the film leaves the kitchen does Tran slowly reveal that Dodin has pined for Eugénie for years and wishes for her to marry him… but to frame things that way runs the risk of making TASTE OF THINGS sound like a genteel love story when it definitely is not. Often Tran seems less interested in telling a story than in achieving a Zen-like state through recreating the atmosphere around a gourmand’s kitchen 140 years ago. However soothing it is to watch the film, there’s something a little unnerving about how Tran deploys movie magic to resurrect a dead way of life; but then, the filmmaker acknowledges this, lets it shadow the movie’s sense of mystery throughout. The final passages are no less elusive than the opening ones, presenting the characters as they go through multiple changes of heart while severely downplaying (if not completely eliding) the internal developments that make these changes possible. Tran’s faith in images over explanations points to why he’s a great filmmaker, and TASTE OF THINGS finds him at the height of his powers. (2023, 135 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
🎞️ ALSO SCREENING
⚫ Asian Pop-Up Cinema
The extensive and inimitable Asian Pop-Up Cinema series continu+es its eighteenth season. Their in-person and virtual offerings are too many to list; visit here for more information.
⚫ Block Cinema (at Northwestern University)
“Irreclaimable: Desert(ed) Lives and Labor Time in Post-Socialist Central Asia,” featuring Saodat Ismailova and Carlos Casas’ 2004 film ARAL. FISHING IN AN INVISIBLE SEA (53 min, Digital Projection) and Zhou Hao’s 2023 film BEFORE SANDSTORM (30 min, Digital Projection), screens Wednesday, 7pm, followed by a post-screening online Q&A with Hao. More info about all screenings here.
⚫ 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 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 will be projected onto a wall in the mezzanine area of the station and will run day and night through March 15, 2026. More info here.
⚫ Chicago Public Library
View all screenings taking place at Chicago Public Library branches here.
⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Herschell Gordon Lewis’ 1963 horror film BLOOD FEAST (67 min, 35mm) screens again on Friday, 10:30pm, as part of the Inside Outsider Cinema series.
Ridley Scott’s 2023 film NAPOLEON (158 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday, 3pm, as part of the New Releases (+ More) series.
Lars von Trier’s 1996 film BREAKING THE WAVES (159 min, 35mm) screens Wednesday, 7pm, as part of the Programmer’s Picks series.
John Parker’s 1955 film WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? (31 min, DCP Digital) and Ray Harrison’s 1963 film DEMENTIA (56 min, DCP Digital) screen Thursday, 9:30pm, as part of the Inside Outsider Cinema series. More info on all screenings here.
⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Hamilton Luske, Wilfred Jackson, and Clyde Geroimi’s 1951 Disney classic ALICE IN WONDERLAND (75 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday and Sunday, 11am, as part of the Kid Flix series. Preceded by a short media-literacy introduction by Film Center staff.
Art21 presents a special screening and conversation with artist Michael Rakowitz as part of EXPO Chicago. The program will begin with a screening of the Art21 Extended Play film HAUNTING THE WEST (12 min, Digital Projection), featuring Rakowitz, followed by a conversation with the artist.
A special preview of Ian Cheney’s 2023 film THE ARC OF OBLIVION (98 min, Digital Projection) screens Saturday, 4pm, as part of Chicago Humanities.
The Film Center will be closed on Monday.
Chiwetel Ejiofor’s 2019 film THE BOY WHO HARNESSED THE WIND (113 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 6pm, as part of Shawn Michelle Smith and Oliver Sann’s Cli-Fi lecture series. More info on all screenings and events here.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
David Zellner and Nathan Zellner’s 2024 film SASQUATCH SUNSET (89 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday, 9:45pm, with more screenings the following week. More info on all screenings here.
⚫ South Side Home Movie Project
Scenes of Parkroom Ballway, featuring select film reels from the Ramon Williams Collection, screens Saturday, 2pm, at Blanc Gallery (4445 S. King Dr.). More info here.
⚫ Sweet Void Cinema (3036 W. Chicago Ave.)
Find more information on the Humboldt Park microcinema, including its larger screening and workshop schedule, here.
🎞️ ONLINE SCREENINGS/EVENTS
⚫ VDB TV
Beyond the Dust: Colonial Legacy in the Desert, programmed by Martí Madaula Esquirol, 2023 - 2024 Graduate Curatorial Fellow at the Video Data Bank, and School of the Art Institute of Chicago MFA candidate in Film, Video, New Media, and Animation, screens for free on VDB TV. Includes short works by More info here.
CINE-LIST: April 11 - April 18, 2024
MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Maxwell Courtright, Nic Denelle, Ray Ebarb, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Ben Kaye, Raphael Jose Martinez, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, K.A. Westphal