:: FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 20 - THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 26 ::

🌈 Reeling Film Festival

Landmark Century Centre Cinema (except where noted) — See showtimes below

NAUGHTY AND NICE: THE PHYSIQUE FILMS OF BOB MIZER (US)
Chicago Filmmakers – Saturday, 6:30pm
If every person were assigned a fate at birth—bear with me—how many would be destined to take provocative photos and make softcore films? Bob Mizer, it would seem, was one such person, whether by fate or choice. At just 13 years old, Mizer, along with a group of friends, found homoerotic pornography in a trashcan; his friends made fun, but Mizer would return, going so far as to hide it in a bush to keep his interest in it from prying eyes. He would, of course, become an incredibly prolific photographer and filmmaker (his archive boasts over 3000 films and one million still images), perhaps most famous for starting Physique Pictorial, a subversive magazine initially masquerading as a bodybuilding rag that he published from 1951 to 1990. NAUGHTY AND NICE: THE PHYSIQUE FILMS OF BOB MIZER, the direction of which is credited only to Mizer himself, doesn’t include any of this information. It may not even be classified as a documentary; rather, it’s several of Mizer’s films, from 1963 through 1976 and in new HD transfers, edited together. The result is a dedicated amount of time in which to watch them, which, hey, can be a beneficial thing. The films aren’t good, per se, unless you’re judging by the enticement within. But they are playful, seemingly free of any angst pertaining to the oppressions of queer people during the time they were made. Which isn’t to discount that reaction, rather to emphasize that these are only intended to generate positive feelings—of lust, of appreciation, or just plain entertainment. Some of the shorts are presented silently, some with music. Only one has dialogue. One throughline I appreciated was, at the end of each film, a titleboard is brought out with the performers’ names, and the men, clad only in posing straps (essentially G-strings) or nothing at all, point to their respective names. Sometimes there’s a little joke about who’s who. A few of the films center on some kind of wrestling match between two characters, while others have Sunday serial-esque plots complete with cheesy costumes. Screening as part of the QuE3R FrAm3s series. (1940-1992, Total approx. 75 min, Digital Projection) [Kat Sachs]
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Zacharías Mavroidís’s THE SUMMER WITH CARMEN (Greece)
Sunday, 8:30pm
Demosthenes, the protagonist of THE SUMMER WITH CARMEN, is first glimpsed by perhaps his distinguishing feature: his bare butt, peeking out from behind some rocks at a nude beach on the Greek coast. It’s a cheeky (heh) introduction for a character who, as is suggested via onscreen text over the same image, will be the hero of the film we’re about to see, and who will go on to be, at times, something of an ass. On this beach under the hot Mediterranean sun, Demosthenes and his longtime friend and former acting partner Nikitas brainstorm the plot for a semi-autobiographical movie. The meta-textual screenplay by Zacharías Mavroidís and Xenofón Chalátsis, inspired by Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze's ADAPTATION. (2002), depicts and deconstructs the movie-within-the-movie the men are coming up with, which revolves around the summer a bereft Demosthenes found himself looking after his ex-boyfriend’s dog Carmen. Between self-reflexive chapter headings such as “Act I: Set Up” and “Plot Point 2,” THE SUMMER WITH CARMEN returns to the nude beach where Demosthenes and Nikitas struggle with classic scriptwriting problems, from the question of whether a homophobic pensioner has any place in a “queer, fun, sexy” film (answer: he does if you have enough gay sex to balance him out), to whether the hero has made a big enough change by the end of the story to fulfill the “Golden Rules of Screenwriting.” It’s all very winky and irreverent, although there is a sweetly earnest ode to platonic friendship running throughout that makes THE SUMMER WITH CARMEN more than a mere lark. And don’t underestimate the many naked men cinematographer Theódoros Michópoulos films like ancient Greek statues against the shimmering Mediterranean Sea, including Demosthenes and the film’s Best Supporting Actor, his butt. (2023, 106 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
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Jane Clark’s WITCHY WAYS (US)
Monday, 6:30pm
After exploring drug addiction in METH HEAD (2013) and blending slasher horror with LGBTQ+ themes in CRAZY BITCHES (2014), director Jane Clark returns with WITCHY WAYS, a supernatural romantic comedy. The film follows Eve (Diora Baird), who takes a sabbatical from her high-pressure job to grieve her mother’s death. In reconnecting with her mother’s past, Eve embarks on her own journey of self-discovery, an element central in queer narratives. Initially too busy to appreciate a cabin retreat cherished by her mother, Eve’s loss prompts her to reevaluate her fast-paced life. During this time of reflection, she meets Danni (Marem Hassler), the cabin’s owner, and a relationship soon blossoms. However, Danni reveals she is a witch, a secret she typically hides from potential partners. As Eve embraces Danni’s spirituality, deeper secrets surface, threatening their love. Clark uses witchcraft not just as a fantasy element, but as a means to explore themes of trust, secrecy, and the complexity of modern relationships, aligning the film with the rising trend in queer cinema to refuse easy categorization. The film blends romance, identity, and self-discovery by borrowing from Lifetime Channel movies, touches of camp, and films like PRACTICAL MAGIC (1998) while also calling out elements of THE CRAFT (1996). WITCHY WAYS offers an exploration of the complexities of relationships both human and ghostly. Through multiple musical montage sequences, there are passages of time dedicated not only to the giddiness of falling in love or passionate sex, but also the moments in a relationship when inevitable arguments require time to breathe. Clark’s characters are richly developed. Eve, more than just a workaholic, fears inheriting her mother's early-onset dementia and struggles with guilt over their distant relationship. Danni, more than just a witch, grapples with trauma and her reluctance to embrace the future. Supporting characters, like Eve’s best friend Penny (Candis Cayne), are equally fleshed out, with Penny offering advice while dreaming of her own magical journey. Penny and Eve refer to each other as Thelma and Louise, a landmark of a great friendship, the “ride or die” friend. WITCHY WAYS is a significant contribution to both supernatural romance and LGBTQ+ cinema. By merging genre conventions from romantic comedies and supernatural dramas, the film expands the boundaries of queer storytelling and challenges traditional depictions of LGBTQ+ love. (2024, 95 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]
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Michael Mabbott and Lucah Rosenberg-Lee’s ANY OTHER WAY: THE JACKIE SHANE STORY (Canada/Documentary)
Monday, 6:45pm
“Tell her that I am happy / Tell her that I am gay / Tell her I wouldn’t have it / Any other way.” These lyrics are from Jackie Shane’s chart-topping song “Any Other Way” and the closest she would come to declaring who she was and how she felt about herself at a time when she had to present as a man—albeit one wearing cosmetics—to perform. Jackie Shane, the subject of Michael Mabbott and Luch Rosenberg-Lee’s revelatory documentary ANY OTHER WAY: THE JACKIE SHANE STORY, was a trans woman who was one of the most popular R&B singers of the 1960s. Born in 1940 in Nashville, rejected by her teenage mother, and raised by an aunt and grandmother who encouraged her singing talent and pride in who she was, she joined a traveling circus that took her to Canada. In Montreal, she met bandleader Frank Motley, who hired her as soon as he heard her sing and took her with his band to Toronto, where she was a top performer in the city’s thriving nightclub scene. Eventually, she moved to Los Angeles, where she transitioned, but lived the bulk of her life in seclusion after being obliged to move back to Nashville to take care of her ailing mother. In 2019, on the cusp of a career resurgence with the release of a compilation of her music that earned a Grammy nomination, Shane died. ANY OTHER WAY assays Shane’s biography through a variety of lenses. The excavation of her personal effects by two nieces who never knew she existed opens the film, and then we are welcomed into Shane’s world through the talking heads of those who knew her and others who have taken inspiration from her. Two of the latter, trans actors Sandra Caldwell and Makayla Couture, read from Shane’s handwritten autobiography and portray Shane in animated reenactments, including lip syncing to Shane’s performances and the phone interviews she gave that form the first-person narrative of the film. These reenactments are done using rotoscope AI technology trained specifically on abstract art, which gives the images a painterly gloss. Interesting highlights include her appearance on the Night Train TV program, a precursor to Soul Train, that recorded the only extant footage of Shane, and clips of a young Jimi Hendrix playing back-up guitar on the show. Crucially, we learn that Shane refused to be bankrolled and promoted by the mafiosi who ran Montreal’s nightclubs, turned down an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show because they insisted that she not wear make-up, and stayed away from American Bandstand because of its racist practices. It’s a shame Shane never got her second act, but this clear-eyed documentary goes a long way toward reviving her life force. Preceded by DON’T CRY FOR ME ALL YOU DRAG QUEENS, a “striking homage to the legendary New Hope drag queen Mother Cavallucci.” Co-Presented by Open Television (OTV) (2024, 98 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Caden Douglas’ MOTHER FATHER SISTER BROTHER FRANK (Canada)
Monday, 8:30pm
Caden Douglas’ MOTHER FATHER SISTER BROTHER FRANK is a brilliant example of a horror-comedy that invokes the spirit of Robert Altman’s signature style, particularly in its use of overlapping dialogue and ensemble casting. Many directors have tried to emulate Altman's method of having characters talk over each other, creating a sense of authenticity and spontaneity; Douglas pulls off this technique masterfully in his feature film debut, showcasing a deep understanding of how to layer character interactions and build a narrative that feels simultaneously chaotic and deeply human. In MOTHER FATHER SISTER BROTHER FRANK, the titular characters are each meticulously crafted to drive the story forward. Like Altman, Douglas uses fast-paced editing and overlapping scenes to ensure that every character is fully fleshed out by the time the story’s central conflict erupts. The film, which unfolds over a single night during a seemingly routine Sunday family dinner, swiftly establishes the individual desires, fears, and inadequacies of the characters. This careful character development ensures that the subsequent events resonate emotionally, giving the film an unexpected depth even as it leans into absurdity. The film opens with Joy (Mindy Cohn), the mother, who is doing her best to keep a cheerful front as she serves dinner. Her forced smiles and tense energy immediately suggest that not all is well beneath the surface. Meanwhile, Jerry (Enrico Colantoni), the father, drinks too much and carries a palpable frustration, his discontent simmering just beneath the surface. The tension escalates with Jolene (Melanie Leishman), the sister, who openly complains about being treated like a child by her parents and wishes she could spend her Sundays anywhere but with her family. Her dissatisfaction adds another layer of strain to the evening. Meanwhile, Jim (Iain Stewart), the brother, is distracted by his phone, constantly receiving texts from his husband Pete (Izad Etemadi), yet refusing to respond, creating an additional thread of intrigue. As the family settles into what appears to be a typical, if uncomfortable, Sunday dinner, Douglas expertly hints that each character is harboring secrets. These secrets are itching to be revealed, creating a slow-build tension that feels like a ticking time bomb. Enter Uncle Frank, played by Juan Chioran, whose sudden appearance throws everything into disarray. Frank is belligerent and unpleasant, the type of relative that everyone tolerates out of obligation rather than affection. His arrival serves as the catalyst for the chaos that follows, marking the shift from tense family drama to full-blown horror-comedy. Douglas' use of limited locations adds to the film’s intimate, stage-play feel. Most of the action takes place within the Jennings family home, yet Douglas ensures that the film never feels claustrophobic or static. His use of handheld camera work adds a frenetic energy to the scenes, mimicking the rising tension among the characters and giving the audience a sense of being trapped in the escalating madness. The handheld style also heightens the sense of chaos that gradually overtakes the family, as long-buried secrets begin to unravel and darkly comedic horror takes center stage. Several motifs are skillfully woven throughout the film, subtly contributing to its overarching themes and humor. For instance, Jerry repeatedly mentions his bulk purchases from Costco, which initially seems like an innocuous bit of dialogue but later becomes a humorous and telling insight into his character's need for control and excess. Another recurring image is that of a dog running past the house, an early and seemingly random occurrence that later becomes a symbol of the impending chaos. One of the film’s standout moments is a scene in which the family does the dishes together—a mundane task that is repeated at the end of the film, though with a decidedly darker and more humorous twist. Douglas proves himself adept at walking the tightrope between horror and comedy, avoiding the common pitfall of veering into outright parody. The film’s dark humor feels integral to the plot rather than an added gimmick. Even as blood begins to spray across the family home, the horror never feels gratuitous or excessive; instead, it is balanced by the absurdity of the situation and the characters' emotional stakes. The humor and horror work in tandem, highlighting the lengths to which families will go to protect themselves when faced with external threats. (2024, 85 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]
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Seán Devlin’s ASOG (Philippines/Canada)
Tuesday, 6:45pm
The Philippines-set ASOG isn’t a documentary, but most of the cast members are non-actors playing themselves, and the two leads cowrote the film (along with director Seán Devlin), basing it on their own experiences. These aspects of the production make ASOG feel like a home movie, but in a good way—the people on screen seem happy to be there and share their lives with the audience. The film centers on Jaya, a nonbinary comedian and drag performer who gets to quit their day job as a high school teacher when they’re offered a hosting position on a regional TV show in the early 2010s. But when Super Typhoon Yolanda hits in November 2013, the TV studio is destroyed, and Jaya must return to teaching. This background information is relayed through Jaya’s voiceover narration (which continues intermittently throughout ASOG), and it establishes them right away as a funny, ingratiating presence. The movie as a whole is winning and humorous, even when it addresses how Yolanda devastated the Philippines. The story kicks into gear when Jaya finds out about the Ms. Gay Philippines drag competition on an island that’s a few days’ journey away; convinced that they’ll win the contest and relaunch their show business career, Jaya scrapes together some money and takes off, forgetting to tell their boyfriend in the process. En route, they discover that Arnel, a former student, is heading in the same direction to track down his missing father; feeling a sense of responsibility, Jaya decides to take him along on the journey. On the good-natured road movie that follows, both characters witness firsthand how badly their country had been affected by the super typhoon, yet they also observe how their compatriots help one another in difficult times. It’s a crowd-pleasing story, and Devlin (a consulting producer on BORAT SUBSEQUENT MOVIEFILM [2020]) realizes it agreeably, eliciting relaxed performances from the inexperienced cast. (2023, 104 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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María G. Royo & Julia de Castro’s ON THE GO (Spain)
Wednesday, 8:30pm
Proudly low-budget filmmaking that delights in bad taste as well as imagination, ON THE GO may not be as shocking as John Waters’ 1970s classics (an obvious point of reference), but it’s still laugh-out-loud funny. Single thirty-something Milagros (Julia de Castro, who also cowrote and codirected) hits the road in a borrowed 1967 convertible to deal with the stress of deciding whether she wants children; as she’s leaving town, she picks up her gay best friend Jonathan (Omar Ayuso), who needs to get out of dodge because he’s just burned down a nightclub. After the two pick up a mermaid, it’s decided they’ll all drive to the ocean so this fertility goddess can go back to her home. Along the way, the three engage in serious conversations about parenthood, steal another car, have sex with random strangers, and take some cops’ guns. Thanks to Waters’ trailblazing influence, it doesn’t seem especially provocative that these characters can break all sorts of taboos and remain sweetly likable; rather, the taboo-breaking is simply treated like something you do when you’re in a movie. No one ever breaks the fourth wall in ON THE GO, but the film is so playfully self-aware that you wouldn’t be surprised if anyone did; there’s a cheery, let’s-put-on-a-show quality to the whole thing that you’ll either find endearing or maddening. PIERROT LE FOU (1965) is another likely influence, not only in its story of criminals on the run and coastal imagery, but in the frequent genre hopping and moments of naked sincerity. Where Godard wanted to depict “the last romantic couple,” ON THE GO is concerned with a pair of best friends, and this allows the film to consider a different sort of intimacy. Milagros and Jonathan have a believable, relatable rapport that hints at years of love and trust; their relationship is one of the few things that the movie treats with unwavering respect. (2023, 73 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Alice Maio Mackay’s CARNAGE FOR CHRISTMAS (Australia)
Thursday, 8:45pm
With five feature films released over four years before even turning 20, Alice Maio Mackay has more than proved her mettle in the genre filmmaking realm, a prodigy with lo-fi spooky cred whose commitment to telling high-energy trans horror stories on her terms is nothing short of inspiring. Her latest, the delightfully disturbed yuletide thriller CARNAGE FOR CHRISTMAS, is yet another step in Mackay’s ever-maturing visual style comprised of garish colorful imagery and practical gore effects, aided by the editing and VFX work of collaborator Vera Drew (the visionary behind another 2024 trans genre epic, THE PEOPLE’S JOKER). Here, frames blend and dissolve into each other, a collage of images bursting through one another to keep the momentum pulsating as the film delves even further into its labyrinthine plotting. A simple rundown: Lola (Jeremy Moineau), the host of a murder podcast, goes back to her tiny hometown to visit her sister, where Soap Opera Bullshit gets her entangled in the lives and grievances of the community she left behind years ago. Such pettiness will soon be thrown to the side though once Lola gets entangled in the reemergence of the Toymaker, a murderous urban legend come to life in the form of a series of gruesome bloody murders perpetrated by a haunting figure donned in a torn-apart Santa suit. Mackay is eager to stuff the film with heaps of expository dialogue, almost like one of Lola’s podcast episodes come to life, and following the twists and turns and character revelations is exhausting if thrilling once the mystery at the center of things is finally unveiled. As ever, Mackay’s films are a delightful dose of messy queer glee injected into an artistic space where that can often feel in short supply, and CARNAGE FOR CHRISTMAS emerges as, what else, a delightfully bloody stocking stuffer. Also available to stream virtually here. (2024, 70 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
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For a full schedule, visit the festival website here. Many films are streaming virtually; see the full selection here.

📽️ Peripheries Experimental Film & Video Festival

Sweet Void Cinema — See showtimes below

Shorts Block A
Friday, 7pm
I would say that all five shorts in this program were shot on film, except that the first, Robin Riad’s ABGAD HOWAZ (2024, 2 min), wasn’t shot at all. It’s a hand-painted/hand-printed film consisting of Arabic letters and short phrases. Like an educational film shot out of a cannon, ABGAD HOWAZ erupts with colors and shapes, making the Arabic language resemble fireworks. It makes for a delightful introduction to the rest of the works, all of which, let’s say, revel in the textures of celluloid. BOSCO (2023, 8 min), by Stefano Canara and Lucie Leszes, begins with some lovely black-and-white shots of bare trees; then, the filmmakers apply various processing techniques until the images are rendered totally abstract. Afterwards, the bare trees are presented again without any effects, and one sees the abstraction within the real, just as moments earlier one had looked for the real thing within the abstraction. The next short, Christophe Guerin’s RENDEZ-VOUS (2024, 5 min), takes a handful of shots from a 1962 film called TIME TO REMEMBER and turns them into a meditation on smoking, nighttime, and paranoia. Following some playfully manipulated shots of a woman enjoying a cigarette in an outdoor café, Guerin illustrates how a filmmaker can create suspense using just a handful of cinematic rudiments. First, the sound of footsteps on cobblestones arise on the soundtrack, then we see shots of feet, and finally a woman’s startled expression—she realizes she is being followed in the night. Sound is also essential to Agnès Hayden’s LATITUDE MESH (2024, 18 min), as it employs industrial, sometimes abrasive noises to underscore the industrial origins of film itself. Per Hayden, the movie compares three different photosensitive emulsions: two created by Kodak and one by the filmmaker herself; it also builds on three concepts: “the descent in photographic latitude from the most light-sensitive emulsion to the least; the descent in geographical latitude, filming from north to south; and a physical camera descent.” Each section of the film achieves its own tactile beauty, though I was most partial to the shots of giant turtles and other large ocean animals. The concluding work in the program, Šilma Müllerová’s CREATURE OF THE SUN (2023, 30 min), is an odd mix of documentary, music video, and nature program techniques, all in the service of a consideration of youth and creativity. In one recurring shot, a group of young girls sit in an artist’s studio and listen as the artist explains her practice to them. In another, a girls choir performs in a dark room while their director, who never appears in the same shot as them, conducts them with a parrot on his shoulder. There are also brief interviews with children ranging from kindergarten age to late adolescents, and frequent cutaways to exotic birds. [Ben Sachs]
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Dan Barnett's SCIENCE WITHOUT SUBSTANCE, SUBSTANCE WITHOUT SCIENCE, and EITHER OR NEITHER (US/Experimental)
Friday, 8:30pm (SCIENCE), Saturday (SUBSTANCE), 8pm, and Sunday, 8pm (EITHER)
Something of a cult figure even in the world of avant-garde film, Dan Barnett is a filmmaker for whom even his biggest fans seem to throw up their hands in confusion when approaching his work. His films won’t fit neatly in a subgenre, with both original and appropriated footage layering into dense visual collages replete with plenty of manipulation after the fact. This sort of bombardment has been present in his work since his seminal WHITE HEART (1975), but Barnett seems to have had a creative renaissance since adopting digital editing in 2016 after a period of inactivity. Since then, he’s made eight films of varying length, including the Sweet Dreamers trilogy of SCIENCE WITHOUT SUBSTANCE (2019, 92 min, Digital Projection), SUBSTANCE WITHOUT SCIENCE (2020, 89 min), and EITHER OR NEITHER (2021, 102 min). Official descriptions of the three films state they’re following "a hapless band of the lost through a shifting landscape," but that hook feels like a bit of a joke; human figures come in and out of the images, but tracking any type of character identification or narrative arc would be pointless. Like a good structuralist, Barnett’s main interest seems to be deeper explorations of his materials by intervention, turning things upside down and inside out, looping and doubling both sound and image in a sort of cubist flowering. We see animals, clouds, astronauts and more get ground into pure texture, letting the film and the viewer by extension bask in the psychedelia of the natural world. Even the film’s flicker effects (including near-constant videotape tracking lines) are partly found naturally, with Barnett combining the shimmers found in water’s movement or papers shuffling with shifting windows of digital flicker. On the soundtrack, occasional voiceover affects a nature documentary being narrated on codeine, dialogue from a film noir, or poetry recitations, while other sound bites clip and loop and threaten to out-clutter the imagery, like a Negativland album if the jokes were even more inside. "It is human to perceive patterns where there are none," reads onscreen text at the beginning of SUBSTANCE WITHOUT SCIENCE; another joke at our expense, daring the audience to try to find a signal in the noise. This second film is theoretically the easiest of the three with which to do that, working at the slowest pace of the trilogy and with much repeated material from the first film, with only some of that one’s jagged rhythms still remaining. A slow drive through the woods is what we see first, as opposed to the number series that begins SCIENCE WITHOUT SUBSTANCE, suggesting an alternative organizing structure: what you’re about to see is actually understandable and intuitive, things you can experience wholly rather than understand in the abstract as an algorithmic combo of items and textures. This, along with the attenuation to style the viewer has gained from sitting through one feature of this stuff already, allows the material a chance to breathe and expand in other ways, with textures asserting their own "substance" outside of the "science" of Barnett’s denser editing patterns. This act of learning how to watch the films pays dividends in EITHER OR NEITHER, where the visual noise reaches its climax. Using most of the same material once more, Barnett provides little breathing room for the final stretch, using nearly unbroken flicker for the film’s 102 minutes and rewarding only those who have successfully rewired their brains over the previous three hours of material. What lies at the end of this road is unclear even to some of Barnett’s biggest fans, making the process a sort of religious one; while anyone can appreciate the impeccable craft on display, the faithful will keep going to the end in the hope that the films unfurl their cosmic mysteries. Just because you can’t see them right away doesn’t mean they aren’t there. [Maxwell Courtright]
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Shorts Block B
Saturday, 2pm
Block B presents eight lively short films concerned with taxonomy, process, and ecology through a logic of the flicker. Ben Creech’s TIME (2024, 2 min) initiates the program with a quick and meticulous reading of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, but not like you’d think. This study is unfettered by jargon or explication, going straight for the kernel, some kind of pure percept (as perhaps the philosopher would contend). Creech has photographed every instance of the word “time” in Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 2: The Time Image and given them to us in rapid succession to the tunes of Madlib’s History of the Loop Digga, wholeheartedly feeling out the difference in each repetition. The indexing continues in Yannick Mosimann’s COME OUT OF YOUR SHELL (2024, 2 min) which celebrates in frenetic motion the otherwise still-life collection of seashell collector Maria Cândida Consolado Macedo, pairing trance flicker with the clacking rhythms of capiz shells to shake up the display boxes without ever upsetting their intricate arrangements. Craig Scheihing’s TO OPEN A WINDOW (2024, 2 min) undulates at light-speed between beautifully dressed windows, frames and openings, leaves and sky, illuminated in shattering sheets and moving dapples. Sarah Bliss’s MOTH PRINT (2024, 3 mins), a cameraless laser-print 16mm film image of a moth "divebombing" a light in fuzzy slow-motion, confronts her father’s textual memories of his own father’s experience with Alzheimer’s and state hospital abuse. Kyle Joseph Petty’s MONOLITHIC TENDERNESS (2024, 7 min) offers up frenzied echoes at the morphed border of nature and culture, flickering between reflective slices of the natural and built environment. Fede Coll’s THE PURE GUILT (2024, 20 min) forges an impressively hypnotic structural poem on Super 8mm, superimposing footage of Good Friday ceremonies in the florid streets of Xàtiva, Valencia with the hulking rock horizon line of the Spanish archipelago Illa Grossa. Riar Rizaldi’s horror short NOTES FROM GOG MAGOG (2022, 19 min) sneaks up in the program with its own flickers, a daring combination of animation, image generation, and observational documentary footage that mythologizes tech labor and supply chains between Jakarta and Seoul. There are a couple agonizing jump scares (you’ve been warned) but the phantasmagoric ride is worth a little nail biting. Nearly as haunted, Sarah Sowell’s COLOR NEGATIVE (2024, 6 min) carries the flickering torch with a 16mm hand-processed color negative film. Sowell runs the numbers on filmmakers’ ecological footprint vis á vis the ever-invoked world of elite private jet flights, specifically those of the Kardashians. COLOR NEGATIVE experiments in a sort of archival-present to seductive effect. [Elise Schierbeek]
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Tone Glow Presents: The States of Place, Pt. 1
Sunday, 2:30pm
A most delicate and poetic program that showcases works that share contemplative imagery and remarkable camera movements. Quick pans and vertigo-inducing spins evoke a sense of instability and displacement. The silent A SENSE OF NOTHING (2024, 4 min) by Francisco Rojas challenges the film reviewer: A whole different empire of vision, impossible to be put into words." No words can fully describe its palpitating and pulsating lights, or its fast flashes of signs and figuration that barely register before vanishing too soon—leaf shadows, the skin, maybe a house or a landscape. The fugitive images quiver, dissolve into splashes of sun-baked colors and bleed into the afterimages. In L’AILIER (2024, 5 min) by Alexandra Karelina, the out-of-focus camera records people in the park in the summertime as they go about their Sunday activities, picnicking, sporting, smoking, the children frolicking. As the camera zooms in, the images become saturated smudges of colors, bouncing off and merging with each other. It’s grainy, fuzzy, like a pointillist painting dancing to an incantational soundscape. Much mystery and uncertainty shroud Leonardo Pirondi’s film poem ADRIFT POTENTIALS (2024, 12 min), which is said to be built upon found footage by an unknown filmmaker who worked under a pseudonym in Los Angeles during Brazil's dictatorship of the 1970s. Is it really the ‘70s? We can’t be so sure; it is as colorful or monochromatic as yesterday. There are shaky shots of the dry landscape in hay color; the sky and tips of palm trees cut out by the windows—as though the one holding the camera was in some kind of confinement; and scenes that keep coming back to a room, the same room, same old sofa chair, the same faded map with curling corners pinned to the wall. "It was as if the ground was not trustworthy anymore," a voice is heard saying, among other fragments including an announcement of Brazil winning the 1970 FIFA World Cup. Much of the film resembles a simulated daydream, an attempted possibility, a vividly lived history that we will know nothing more about but are almost convinced that has existed. Onyou Oh marries poetry and the sea in ETERNAL DEPTH (2024, 7 min), a symbolist work gravitated by the theme of death but still floats light like seabirds on water. Through Oh’s camera, we see a mesmerizing portrait of the ocean and imagine the story that’s beneath. The “white horses” galloping atop the sea surface, leaving a swirl of azure and white. Watching Sofia Theodore-Pierce’s DESIRE PATH (2024, 2 min) is like flipping through a diary: fragments of intimacy, travels, friends, moments, routines, a beautiful song… life keeps spinning. SILENT CONVERSATIONS (2023, 8 min) by Eva Giolo is a series of silent portraits of two people embracing, in domestic settings, with not a word uttered. It is a simple but most affective collection of expressions of care, yearning, and love. Every scene a painting. Blanca García can cast spells at the images with her camera. Filmed in the New Forest, the largest remaining unenclosed common land in England, with shots of pages of a 1974 children’s book of the same name, HOW TO MAKE MAGIC (2024, 5 min) depicts an enchanted nature through the magic of filmmaking. Bruno Delgado Ramo’s LABORES EN CURSO (2024, 30 min), presented on Super 8, is a film about routine, practice, measurement, and the noticeable variation in each repetition. It’s a film of incredible rhythms and delicate cinematography that evoke visual humor. The filmmaker choreographs the camera hyperactively: it bobs up or swipes left like a palimpsest; between every jump cut, there’s a lapse of time. Stories are only alluded to. Hands and bodies are being studied as they work, making bread, making bricks. Regularly, recurring static shots of the surrounding nature punctuate with quietness: a fuzzy horizon, a patch of sky through a construction site, birds, grass, shadows. [Nicky Ni]
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Tone Glow Presents: The States of Place, Pt. 2
Sunday, 4pm
These four short films monumentalize place through austere observation and dignified romance. The program opens with Ewelina Rosinska’s masterful, first-person ASHES BY NAME IS MAN (2023, 20 min), an achingly beautiful song of Polish homeland and the hushed aesthetic glory of the Catholic Church as it imbues itself in the material world. Shot on 16mm, the film loosely follows what appear to be the filmmaker’s elderly relatives as they go through the motions of family-historical visitations, silently reflecting on heritage. Opening on hands playing piano and the quietude of felled trees, the film induces a sonic melancholy in shuffles, murmurs, and organ interludes as Rosinska captures the baroque corners and personal gestures of church service, the slowed time of family walks, and the serendipity of deer paths. The film makes clear that Rosinska is a fastidious student of light, motivated by a painterly love that calls to mind the corpus of Andrew Wyeth, sharing an intuitive grasp of landscapes, animals, homes, churches, and graveyards in resplendent repose. Playing with the syntax of photo-roman and stretching beyond, Rosinska’s edit reveals a voice as self-assured as the most intimate vernaculars—the secret languages of family or the sovereign automatic poetry of divine inspiration. ASHES BY NAME IS MAN culminates in the peeling of an apple beneath exquisite light, reminding me that a tender thing has been shorn toward its core, that I’ve been given a slice of something from far away. The States of Place is further elaborated by Kamal Aljafari, a longtime mainstay of Palestinian experimental film, who has laid out a fragmented archival image of the Palestinian landscape from above and below in UNDR (2024, 15 min). Aljafari appropriates surveillant Israeli helicopter-filmed rushes in predatory meditation, their perspective revolving to the tune of a music box melody that tightly winds a desert image to the point of implosion. One gets the impression that the land is being surveyed and tested, through the language of controlled demolition, as dynamite elliptically tears into hillsides and cliffs and as a populace waits. Intercut with the aerial perspective are grounded but fleeting scenes of farm work, washes in the river, children peering away from camera and around trees in the language of hide-and-seek. These figures are torn from the cohesion of their neighboring sequences which repeatedly present holes and caverns ripped open through landscapes and hillsides. UNDR offers a tense poetry of ancient natural land formations against the concrete horrors of a deep geopolitics, in order to repossess a stolen visuality. Contouring this necessarily abstract document is Rawane Nassif’s intimate memoir MSAYTBEH, THE ELEVATED PLACE (2024, 20 min), a concrete but equally ghostly endeavor to picture a place. Returning to her home, Msaytbeh, a neighborhood of Beirut, after a twenty-year period away, Nassif voices her recollections of childhood and aging, dispersals and returns, as she projects a documentary image of her parents’ home onto a destroyed bathroom wall in the Beit Beirut—the house of Beirut"—a war memorial museum located on the former Lebanese Civil War demarcation line. Nassif embeds her personal memory into the space of a collective remembering, recalling the former social texture of Msaytbeh as home to a caring community of secular and religious leftists. A work of grief, probing belonging and loss, the film is a burning question about Beirut as the filmmaker speaks to ongoing shock, her bleak, honest searching and waiting amidst the material reality of drastic change. Also included in the program is Guadeloupe-born composer Allan Gilbert Balon’s mythopoeic ode to self-transformation and island landscape, SI LONGTEMPS (2020, 8 mins). Copies of the artist’s new LP The Magnesia Suite (released by Recital) will be on sale during the programs. [Elise Schierbeek]
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For a full schedule, visit the Sweet Void website here.

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Michelle Citron’s DAUGHTER RITE (US/Experimental)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 6pm

On finishing my first viewing of DAUGHTER RITE, I was astonished to learn from the credits that the narrator and two onscreen presences were actors and that none of them were Michelle Citron, who wrote, directed, and edited the film. That’s because DAUGHTER RITE feels so confessional that I mistook it for autobiography—the film delivers such piercing insights into womanhood and mother-daughter relationships that they seem like they were all learned firsthand. To watch the film is like being let in on a secret, as Citron airs feelings of insecurity, anger, and resentment that most of us are too timid to share in public. One strand of the movie is especially intimate: over old home movie footage, a nameless narrator describes how her relationship with her mother has changed since she got divorced from the  narrator’s father. The movie practically opens with the narrator admitting to reevaluating her life when she turned 28 because that’s the age her mother was when she had her; what follows elaborates on this central theme of the complicated (and not always happy) bonds between mothers and daughters. In another strand of the movie, two grown sisters spend time together and open up about how they feel about their mother, who never appears on screen. It becomes clear that the women’s mother, like the mother of the narrator, was overprotective to the point of interfering in her children’s lives. It also becomes clear that one point of adulthood for these women has been learning to define themselves apart from their mother. Citron conveys these revelations gradually and casually; the narrator in particular relates her story as if she were talking to an old friend. Yet this casualness betrays the urgency of Citron’s message. The narrator reflects on the universal struggle of learning to renegotiate your relationship with your parents when you enter adulthood, while the sisters act out the necessary work of processing childhood trauma as a grown-up. At the climax of DAUGHTER RITE, one of the sisters delivers a monologue about surviving sexual assault as a teenager, and her understated demeanor makes it all the more powerful. That’s in keeping with the film as a whole, which highlights the commonness of certain women’s frustrations so as to emphasize the need for sweeping changes in how families relate to one another. Followed by a discussion between Citron and critic, scholar, and programmer B. Ruby Rich. (1978, 53 min, 16mm) [Ben Sachs]

Sarah Maldoror's SAMBIZANGA (Angola/France)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, 8:30pm

The vexation of Kafka joined with the ferment of colonialism, Sarah Maldoror’s SAMBIZANGA—the first film produced by a  Lusophone African nation, by some accounts the first feature to have been directed by a woman in sub-Saharan Africa, and the prolific Marxist filmmaker's second feature—is especially unnerving as it deals in the real-life terror of subjugation. Set in the titular village of Luanda (the capital city of Angola), the film follows the sudden arrest of Domingos, a manual laborer, on suspicion of being part of a covert resistance movement against the Portuguese colonialists; it also concerns his wife Maria as she tries to discover what’s happened to him, navigating a Trial-esque bureaucracy with their baby son fastened to her back. SAMBIZANGA was adapted from José Luandino Vieira’s 1961 novella The Real Life of Domingos Xavier by Maldoror, her partner Mário Pinto de Andrade (a founder of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola [MPLA], as well as its first president), and French novelist Maurice Pons. The story navigates between Domingos’ detention and Maria’s journey, with suggestions of the larger anti-colonialist liberation movement interwoven amidst them, showing how whisper networks of subversion facilitate the larger, eventual rebellion. Maldoror’s background is as varied as it is impressive. The daughter of a French mother and Guadeloupean father, born in southwestern France, she studied drama in Paris, where she was one of the founding members of Les Griots, a troupe of African and Afro-Caribbean actors. She later studied film in the Soviet Union under the tutelage of Mark Donskoy at the Moscow Film Academy, overlapping with Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène during his time there. In SAMBIZANGA, she adroitly communicates information in tandem with the narrative, resulting in something that edifies the curiosity of outsiders and immerses all spectators in the narrative trajectory. At the beginning of the film, a sheath of text augurs a real-life uprising that took place on February 4, 1961 in Luanda, when “a group of militants set out from Sambizanga… intending to storm the capital's prison. At the same time, they gave the signal for the armed struggle for national independence that has engulfed Angola ever since.” Domingos and Maria’s trials come to represent that which spurs the eventual uprising, which is fueled by the poverty and exploitation thrust upon them by the colonialist interlopers—a justifiable resentment patiently nurtured until the clandestine became justly impudent. Shot in the People’s Republic of the Congo, the film is not just a testament to the Angolan liberation movement of which the MPLA was a significant part but to the spirit of Pan-Africanism in general; Maldoror sees in various locales around the continent a common goal that transcends geography. That’s evident in the casting as well: primarily working with amateurs (with the exception of French actor Jacques Poitrenaud, who plays the white authority figure who tortures Domingos), Maldoror recruited Domingos Oliveira, an Angolan exile working in the Congo, to appear as the character of the same name, and Cape Verdean economist Elisa Andrade, who appeared in Maldoror’s 1968 short MONANGAMBÉ, plays Maria. Filmically it’s a stunning work, the expressive cinematography lending additional contours and its soundtrack another layer of emotional depth to the characters and thus the country’s harrowing struggle. Screening as part of Films by Women/Chicago '74. (1972, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Agnès Varda’s LIONS LOVE (...AND LIES) (France)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, 6pm

In 1967 Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy moved to Los Angeles when Demy was given an opportunity by Columbia Pictures to make a film in Hollywood, which would eventually become MODEL SHOP (1969). Columbia had also approached Varda to make a film about American hippies called PEACE AND LOVE, but the deal fell apart when they refused to give her final cut. What did Varda do? She made a film about a filmmaker (Shirley Clarke, playing herself) who ventures to Hollywood and becomes dejected after her deal with a studio falls apart because she wants final cut. Sound familiar? In one scene Clarke begins taking pills, ostensibly to die by suicide, when, suddenly, she tells Agnès she’s can’t do it. “I’m not an actress…,” she says, “and I wouldn’t take pills, anyway.” Off screen she and Varda argue, the latter telling her “it has to be done,” after which Varda comes into the frame, donning the same shirt and necklace as Clarke had been wearing, and proceeds to do it herself. Clarke eventually capitulates, resolving another aspect of this metacinematic quagmire. One of Varda’s most freewheeling endeavors, LIONS LOVE (...AND LIES) mostly centers not on Clarke but three hippies, Warhol superstar Viva and Hair co-authors James Rado and Gerome Ragni, living in a rented house while awaiting a film shoot. As the pages of a calendar are shown one after the other floating in a pool, indicating the period of time over which it’s set (the week both Andy Warhol and Robert F. Kennedy were shot) they do what three flower children with nothing to do, do: nothing. There are long sequences of nonsensical meandering, including tableau-like sequences wherein the three main players appear as living art. (Arguably the best is the Magritte tableau.) Within the film the Warhol and Kennedy shootings are acknowledged, emphasizing against the seeming fairyland of their Shangri-La lives the violence of the times, set as it is in 1968. In addition to this, the overall metafiction and the Warholian inanity, there’s also something of a love letter to LA in here, too. There’s of course the stars, but also late film historian Carlos Clarens, who takes us to the legendary Larry Edmunds Bookshop. Among the more underappreciated of Varda’s films, it may not succeed as wholly as many of her other works, but it’s fun to watch with some interesting formal bits to boot. Screening as part of Films by Women/Chicago '74. (1969, 112 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Jean-Jacques Beineix's DIVA (France)

Music Box Theatre – Saturday, 11:30am

DIVA was the flagship film of what came to be known as the “cinéma du look,” a wave of French movies released in the '80s and '90s that celebrated style over substance. At least this is how many critics characterized the films when they first came out. Time has been rather generous to the work of Léos Carax, who was initially grouped in with the movement as a result of his first two features, BOY MEETS GIRL (1984) and MAUVAIS SANG (1986), and Jean-Jacques Beineix, who made DIVA, displays an interest in narrative trickery as well as visual expressiveness. (The films of fellow “look” director Luc Besson, on the other hand, still seem pretty superficial.) DIVA abounds with double-crosses and unexpected twists, and these enliven an otherwise basic chase film. Jules is an opera-loving Parisian postal worker who secretly tapes the performance of a recording-averse American singer; gangsters mistake the tape for the recorded confession of a mob-connected police chief, and soon they’re after Jules in pursuit of his bounty. The film contains a famous motorcycle chase that partly takes place in the Paris subway; one of the most celebrated sequences of its day, it generates tremendous suspense while showcasing Beineix’s filmmaking chops. The rest of the movie is visually striking as well, as the director employs lots of extended tracking shots and surprising editing choices to draw you into the tale. Screening as part of the Chicago International Film Festival Presents: BIG ART FILMS series. (1981, 117 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Shu Lea Cheang's FRESH KILL (US)

Music Box Theatre – Wednesday, 7pm

Looser and more underground than Hal Hartley’s early features but less outré than what Jon Moritsugu was making around the same time, FRESH KILL remains an agreeable example of post-Jarmuschian cool. It takes place on Staten Island and features almost no white characters; the principal exception is a woman who’s raising a Black daughter with an Indian-American woman and whose mother is also Black. She works at a trendy sushi bar where the other staff members are Latinx and Chinese, and practically everyone she knows loves to rant about how corporate culture is destroying the world. The ramshackle plot has something to do with a toxic waste spill and subsequent corporate cover-up, but FRESH KILL is best appreciated as a collection of wry, literate moments held together by a hip, multicultural ambience. If the film feels indebted to STRANGER THAN PARADISE (1984) and DOWN BY LAW (1986) in its understated humor and deliberate compositional style, it also anticipates GHOST DOG (2000) in its utopian racial politics. The depiction of nascent internet culture is fascinating too, reflecting another utopian dream of the 1990s that didn’t play out as many people hoped. Followed by a post-screening Q&A with the director. (1994, 78 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Mireille Dansereau's DREAM LIFE (Canada)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 6:15pm

The first Quebecois feature film directed by a woman, DREAM LIFE is the story of two 20-something colleagues and friends stumbling through a post-'60s world. The first time the pair speak to each other on-screen addresses the necessity of makeup. Virginie (Veronique Le Flaguais) tells Isabelle (Liliane Lemaitre-Aug), “You don’t need makeup!” Although constantly aware of how they are being perceived, Virginie and Isabelle are unburdened and unbothered. They picnic in a cemetery nude, are the only ones in the pool changing room not hiding their bodies, and giggle as they’re chased by a car of rowdy catcallers. They are unencumbered by the tools of oppression hoisted upon women, the sneers, the chastising, the slurs hurled and whispered. Isabelle and Virginie cast away their oppression through fantasy and art. They dream and create. Connectedness is demonstrated through displays and acts of artmaking, ceramics, animation, painting, and collage. In a film so influenced by the distinct free-wheeling and flurry of imagination of the French New Wave, the real world’s expectations are never far. It's as if they are circling the drain of inevitable, crushing subjugation–chasing escape from the life they have witnessed in generations before and vowed not to repeat. A world shrinking as their ideologies and convictions only grow more fully formed. DREAM LIFE serves as an indictment of the free-love movement and a fanged examination of the women who were left behind by it. Screening as part of Films by Women/Chicago '74. (1972, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Olivia Hunter Willke]

Kazik Radwanski's MATT AND MARA (Canada)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

Kazik Radwanski’s MATT AND MARA is an exciting release for those who have been paying attention to the last decade of Canadian indie film. Radwanski’s fourth feature is his highest-profile to date, made with his highest budget yet following the indie success of his previous film ANNE AT 13,000 FEET (2019). The film’s stars, Matt Johnson and Deragh Campbell, are a sort of king and queen of the current Canadian indie scene, with Johnson’s DIY production ethos building in scope up to last year’s breakthrough BLACKBERRY, and Campbell appearing as actor and collaborator in a spate of recent forward-thinking works by the likes of Sofia Bohdanowicz and Blake Williams. Their casting in this film is a study in contrasts, their characterizations almost playing like a referendum on their respective performance styles and broader tendencies in their work. Where Johnson has a freewheeling, charismatic extroversion that endears him to anyone he meets, Campbell’s steely interiority traps her in her own head, friendly and communicative but constantly dissecting. Mara’s a creative writing professor who gets a visit from her old friend Matt, a fellow writer back in town following the publication of his new book. As they resume their friendship, their obvious chemistry and differing priorities provoke difficult questions about what they expect from one another. While the events of the film touch on more conventional indie drama fare (a terminally ill relative factors into the plot), Radwanski and his regular editor Ajla Odobasic push the film through time, distilling scenes to small but pointed observations. Labor, or the lack thereof, is often the driver of action in Radwanski’s work, something that quite literally gives the characters something to do but mainly provides insight to their body language, the way their presence in the world is defined by gesture. This is his first film about intellectual laborers, and thus has a more discursive mode than his previous features, even more trained on actors’ faces and speech as their professional and private tendencies start to blend together. The film seems especially interested in modern identity fragmentation, acknowledging that a person’s general, professional, and artistic senses of identity are all distinct from one another. Radwanski gives us character exposition via author bios, a sort-of officially presented version of the self that gets attached to creative work and which is both intentionally and unintentionally revealing; Mara has passport photos taken in several scenes, an act where one must present their most "true" and identifiable self as one without any expression beyond a flat, forward-looking neutrality. In ways particular to each character, Matt and Mara mutually fail to read information that’s supposed to be apparent—they rely on friendship cues of time gone by, only to realize their basic interpersonal problems are still the same, and that these might not be specific to them, but rather a fundamental illegibility of all people. Radwanski cleanly fits these ideas into the shell of a Rohmer riff partly thanks to impressive work by DP Nikolay Michaylov, which allows the film’s Bressonian visual language to provide an analogue to the analytical but limited focus of the characters. It puts the film in conversation with recent indies like GOOD ONE, AFTERSUN, or the work of Eliza Hittman in how its reduced drama highlights the more affective qualities of memory and communication. It’s an impressive balancing act, and one that reaffirms Radwanski as one of the most compelling dramatic filmmakers working now, in Canada or anywhere. (2024, 80 min, DCP Digital) [Maxwell Courtright]
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Cine-File co-managing editor Ben Sachs will moderate a Q&A with Radwanski after the Saturday, 7:30pm screening.

Wakefield Poole’s BOYS IN THE SAND (US/Adult)

Music Box Theatre – Saturday, Midnight

There’s a lot to celebrate about Wakefield Poole’s BOYS IN THE SAND (the title is a play on the name of Mart Crowley’s 1968 play, The Boys in the Band). It’s one of the earliest porn films to achieve a certain level of commercial and critical success—Gerard Damiano’s DEEP THROAT, that landmark of the so-called Golden Age of Porn, would come a year later—as well as the first of such films to include a credits sequence and to be reviewed by Variety. It was also heralded by an advertising campaign that was theretofore unprecedented for a porn film (and the first occasion of the New York Times accepting a gay display ad, per Poole’s autobiography; he writes that he didn’t “know how we got such good placement… I’d like to think some gay man in the advertising department had pulled some strings).” While this all may not seem shocking in retrospect, it certainly was then—raids even occurred to expose it. Where it’s revolutionary in its very existence, it’s tenfold more compelling for its substance. Composed of three segments, all starring Casey Donovan—for whom this was a breakout role, which he hoped, to no avail, would enable him to crossover into mainstream films—and all taking place on Fire Island, each is a melange of pure creativity (Poole’s background as a dancer and choreographer is evident, as, like some porn, dance is mostly free of dialogue, the setting and movement providing for what can’t be said) and even purer eroticism. The second segment finds Donovan’s character receiving a package he sent away for, which contains a table that, when thrown into his pool, turns into a beautiful man. If only! As Poole wrote in his memoirs about filming a gay sex scene for the first time (with his then-lover, Peter Fisk, who appears in the first segment of BOYS IN THE SAND), having been inspired to do so upon coming out of HIGHWAY HUSTLER and wondering why there couldn’t be “a pretty porno movie,” though he’d first start with this 10-minute short, BAYSIDE, “I had always been observant, but now I was able, with the help of the zoom lens, to actually see things I could never see with the naked eye. It was almost hypnotic, and at times the camera seemed to have a mind of its own… I created my reality by selecting what would fill the small frame through which I looked.” BOYS IN THE SAND didn’t just change the landscape of male eroticism—Variety would write, “There are no more closets!,” suggesting the influence of the films’ relatively mass appeal in opening eyes and hopefully hearts on both sides of the equation—but Poole’s life as well. It brought him out of the closet and into the spotlight. “Who’d have thought everything I had done up to this point would result in my making a hit porno movie? I certainly had no idea—not even a year before—that my life would bring me here.” Preceded by Poole’s 1971 short film ANDY (10 min, DCP Digital). Presented and programmed by The Front Row and Olivia Hunter Willke, with an introduction by Scott Potis. 1971, 100 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Krzysztof Kieślowski’s THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VÉRONIQUE (France/Poland/Norway)

Music Box Theatre – Sunday, 8pm

Krzysztof Kieślowski originally wanted to make hundreds of different cuts of THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VÉRONIQUE—as many versions of the film as there were theaters to show it. He quickly abandoned this idea for obvious reasons, but it speaks to the open-ended nature of the film that its director saw it as permanently in flux. More than any other work in Kieślowski’s oeuvre, VÉRONIQUE is concerned with the transient nature of existence; it’s also a film about the small, seemingly inconsequential moments that can have great impact on how we live our lives. These are fairly abstract concepts to make a narrative film about, and Kieślowski (who dreaded being called pretentious more than anything) recognized this. As the film’s lead actress, Irène Jacob, explained in an interview, the Polish auteur tried to ground every moment in concrete details that viewers could easily identify and relate to; when he directed Jacob, he would have her devise specific gestures to express each emotional state, not unlike a silent filmmaker. In fact, VÉRONIQUE contains relatively little dialogue in spite of its heady ideas, but this isn’t surprising, since Kieślowski’s greatness lay in his ability to communicate philosophical concepts in a lucid manner. At the heart of the film lie some of the oldest philosophical conundrums: Is life governed by destiny or chance? Are there metaphysical forces operating in the physical world? And if there are, can we rely on these forces to act in our interests? In a Cannes award-winning performance, Jacob stars as two young women whose lives may or may not be connected. Weronika, who lives in Warsaw, has her budding career as a concert vocalist cut short by a heart condition; while Véronique, who lives in Paris, abruptly quits studying music when she experiences a bad premonition, then starts to navigate her new life. Kieślowski presents Weronika’s story, then Véronique’s, allowing for rhymes within the story to develop subtly and mysteriously. The look of the film reinforces a spirit of metaphysical inquisitiveness—thanks to Slawomir Idziak’s cinematography, everything has a burnished, ominous aura—but never at the expense of Kieślowski’s appreciation of the everyday. Co-presented by WBEZ, with a post-screening conversation with Greg Gonzalez from the band Cigarettes After Sex moderated by Mark Caro (Caropop podcast host and longtime Chicago cultural journalist). (1991, 98 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Mai Zetterling’s THE GIRLS (Sweden)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 8:30pm

Simone de Beauvoir called this “the best movie ever made by a woman,” further attesting that “[t]hrough a moment in the lives of three women, we sense what it means to be a woman.” That’s an apt summation of both the plot and intent of Mai Zetterling’s film, centering  on three women who are acting in a touring production of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, in which the women of Greece withhold sex as a means of compelling their men to end the Peloponnesian War (a conceit notably reinvented in Spike Lee’s 2015 film CHI-RAQ). Zetterling began as an actress, making this slightly autobiographical, as the frustrations exhibited in the film were similar to those harbored by Zetterling herself as she strove to supersede her image as an actress and get behind the camera rather than in front of it. “I didn’t want to act anymore,” she says in an interview on the Criterion channel in alignment with her first feature film, LOVING COUPLES (1964). “I’d had enough. I have to do and understand things happening in the world. I feel I have a lot to say. Maybe I don’t say it very well, but I do the very best I can. I wanted to broaden my horizons, to take myself further.” As do her characters, Liz (Bibi Andersson), who stars as Lysistrata in the play; Marianne (Harriet Anderson); and Gunilla (Gunnel Lindblom). Each is being oppressed in her own way: Liz’s husband is cheating on her, while Marianne has a child born of a married man who only says he’ll leave his wife. Gunilla is a mother of four, and her husband resents that she’s going on tour, leaving him with the kids. Each has their own reality-based and fantastical interludes, surreal asides in which they express and exorcise their grievances against the patriarchy (my favorite involves Marianne and her married boyfriend flirtatiously flitting through what appears to be a store that sells only beds—it may appear jovial, and certainly is charming, but much like the bed store, where each is a made-up room, the relationship is just an illusion of respectful domesticity); as the tour proceeds, the women, Liz specifically, begin to question how the play is affecting their audience. After one show she keeps them from leaving and attempts to enter into a dialogue with them about the text, though it ends up being a monologue, expressed to an impassive congregation. The tour is the path they’re on to end the war raging within, one outcome perhaps disappointing, one perhaps expected, and one that, while not being surprising, per se, shows a glimmer of hope that women can move forward. Interestingly, in several of her films Zetterling critiqued the Swedish welfare state for having failed to achieve an egalitarian society and continued to reinforce conservative mores such as gender roles. THE GIRLS was a flop upon initial release, receiving some extremely misogynistic reviews (in the aforementioned interview Zetterling notes that the one positive review came from a female critic), though it’s since become highly regarded and among the most exhibited of Zetterling’s films. It’s hard to say if this is the best film ever made by a woman, but it’s certainly up there. Screening as part of Films by Women/Chicago '74. (1968, 100 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's CURE (Japan)

FACETS Cinema – Friday, 7pm

Identity as a motif has preoccupied numerous filmmakers, from Ingmar Bergman (PERSONA) to Monte Hellman (ROAD TO NOWHERE) and Abbas Kiarostami (CLOSE-UP). Identity is often tied up with psychosis, and psychotics frequently feature in horror and suspense films because they channel the restless, faceless Id that resides in all of us. The idea that any one of us could become a gruesome killer if someone or something pierced our social conditioning is at the heart of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s CURE. Kurosawa, interested in the shocked comments people invariably make after a neighbor or acquaintance commits a brutal murder (“He was such a nice man. They were an ordinary couple.”), explores the nature of identity and whether our bodies and minds are mere vessels waiting to be filled. On a busy street in Tokyo, a man (Ren Ohsugi) walks through a damp tunnel as cars pass on his right. A fluorescent light illuminating the tunnel blinks and buzzes. We next see the man in a hotel room with a naked prostitute. He is moving about the room, and she is sitting up in bed. Suddenly, he grabs a pipe and bashes her twice on the head. When next we enter the room, it is filled with police investigators. The lead detective, Kenichi Takabe (Kôji Yakusho), observes that a deep “x” has been cut across the prostitute’s neck and chest. The man is found naked, hiding in an air duct in the hallway. When he is questioned at police headquarters by Takabe and police psychiatrist Makoto Sakuma (Tsuyoshi Ujiki), the man has no idea why he killed the woman. Takabe will have several more such murders to investigate as the film goes on, but he must balance this puzzle with the increasing burden posed by his wife Fumie’s (Anna Nakagawa) mental deterioration. As other “x” cases come to the fore, we and Takabe slowly discover what links them together: a young amnesiac who is soon identified as Kunio Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara), a medical school dropout whose disheveled home reveals shelves of books about psychiatry, psychosis, and works about and by Franz Mesmer, a German physician who developed the idea of animal magnetism, or in the term used in the film, hypnosis, to influence behavior. As with most detective-centered stories, Takabe is no ordinary cop. Mamiya entices him with an accurate assessment of the detective’s torment. It is Mamiya’s conviction that most people don’t know themselves, the many selves hidden under the surface, the duality of their generous and vicious impulses. He considers Takabe extraordinary, like himself, for recognizing the split in himself. Kurosawa’s camerawork is beyond good. He scouted locations in and around Tokyo that reek of decay, giving us a fair approximation of a haunted house in the penultimate scene where the final showdown between Takabe and Mamiya takes place. He combines handheld work with static long shots of great beauty and atmosphere. He knows how to create tension by considering the images outside the frame, for example, having Sakuma enter Mamiya’s cell, which has a short wall hiding the toilet area in which Mamiya is standing. We don’t see the prisoner, but we know what he’s capable of, and the fear of actually looking at him infuses this scene powerfully. Indeed, Mamiya is rather like a filmmaker, bringing us under his spell, finding our triggers, and conjuring images through exposition and suggestion. With CURE, Kurosawa has created a powerhouse of psychological horror. (1997, 111 min, Digital Projection) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Screening as part of the new Cold Sweat monthly series with Hideo Nakata’s 1998 Japanese horror film RINGU (97 min, 4K DCP Digital Projection).

Elia Kazan's A FACE IN THE CROWD (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 2pm

François Truffaut characterized Elia Kazan’s A FACE IN THE CROWD as “a great and beautiful work whose importance transcends the dimension of a cinema review.” Well. I’ve got my work cut out for me. Perhaps J. Hoberman felt the same way when he chose to make a thorough examination of the film the epilogue of his book An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War? More on that later. Andy Griffith, best known for playing Atticus Finch-lite on his eponymous television show, stars as Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes, who’s given his nickname by Patricia Neal’s Marcia Jeffries after she discovers him in her small town jail’s drunk tank and puts him on her local radio program. Lonesome is not a particularly talented singer—rather, his talent lies in his rudimentary, if somewhat dishonest, philosophical ramblings, which catapult him to success. It’s hard not to think of Donald Trump when watching A FACE IN THE CROWD, despite the seeming political disparity. Indeed, Hoberman notes that “[l]onesome though he may be, Rhodes can instrumentalize mass culture because he personifies it. Before the movie ends, he is... a major threat to American democracy.” Hoberman also analyzes the way in which Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg depict television as a medium that can be used to unduly influence its audience, a scenario that played out before our very eyes when a reality star with no previous political experience ran for President of the United States. “Kazan and Schulberg intuited that... media personalities and movie stars would now nominate themselves for the leading roles,” Hoberman writes, something that he says came to “full fruition” with Reagan, and that’s now even yuger—and scarier—in light of Trump’s rise to power. Griffith’s performance (his big-screen debut) is as deft as it is disconcerting; even his features appear larger-than-life as he takes on Lonesome’s mendacious personality. Neal, in a performance that one might say is the antithesis of her role as Dominique Francon in King Vidor’s adaptation of The Fountainhead, serves as the so-called moral straight man, and Walter Matthau’s Mel Miller (or Vanderbilt ‘44 as Lonesome calls him, revealing an anti-intellectual attitude that’s all too familiar) foils her earnestness with his acerbic yet perceptive cynicism. A FACE IN THE CROWD certainly won’t make you feel better about the upcoming election, but perhaps there’s some reassurance in knowing that the more things change, the more they stay the same—or is there? Regardless, you can take comfort in the “great and beautiful work” that’s both astute and entertaining. Screening as part of the Democracy at Risk series. (1957, 126 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Liliana Cavani’s THE NIGHT PORTER (Italy/France)

Leather Archives & Museum – Saturday, 7pm

It is axiomatic, especially in film, that Nazis are deviants in body and soul. While this assertion certainly has some basis in truth, it simplifies the complexity of the human psyche and physical urges to which we are all subject. THE NIGHT PORTER, realized by still-working Italian screenwriter and director Liliana Cavani, traffics in all the tropes of Nazi deviance and cowardice but delves deeper into the roots of the sadomasochistic relationship at its center. Max (Dirk Bogarde), a night porter at Vienna’s Hotel Oper, is a harsh boss to his underlings and reluctant fixer for resident guest Countess Stein (Isa Miranda). One day, an American conductor, in Vienna to lead The Magic Flute, walks in with his elegant wife, Lucia (Charlotte Rampling), in tow. When Max and Lucia lock eyes, a horrible spark that was lit during World War II is reignited. Lucia, a young concentration camp prisoner, became the plaything of Max, an SS officer. He trained her in sexual exhibitionism, which she shows off in a memorable scene in a Weimar-style cabaret in the officers’ section of the camp (ironic, as the Nazis were supposedly trying to stamp out the degeneracy of the Weimar Republic), and beat and raped her regularly. Lucia gives up her glamorous, respectable life to return rapturously to her tormentor, who says he loves “his little girl.” Today, we might liken Lucia’s actions to the fear and low self-esteem of an abused spouse, but in the ’60s and ’70s, the rapture of sadomasochism was very definitely in vogue, from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s SALÒ, OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM (1975) and Nagisa Ôshima’s IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES (1976) to the film THE NIGHT PORTER most reminds me of, Luchino Visconti’s THE DAMNED (1969). Max trained Lucia to be his perfect girl as only a Nazi can, and given that he probably took her virginity, she imprinted on him as the loving “protector” she needed in a place where there was no solace or safety. A side plot of a group of Nazis trying to bury their past and a superfluous (but lovely) solo rehearsal and performance in a nude-colored thong by ballet dancer Amedeo Amodio as co-conspirator Bert serve as little but icing on the film’s perversion. In addition, the horrors of the camps are reduced to a scene of nude people being registered in and acting as a stylized audience to some of the activities of their Nazi captors. Although THE NIGHT PORTER is pretty tame by today’s standards, the blockade to near-starvation of Lucia and Max by the cabal who want to “file” her as a dangerous witness to their deeds is pretty harrowing. Screening as part of the Fetish Film Forum. (1974, 118 min, Digital Projection) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Shinji Sômai's MOVING (Japan)

FACETS Cinema – Saturday, 3pm and Thursday, 6:30pm

Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi (and a good number of Japanese critics) all consider Shinji Sômai the most important Japanese filmmaker of the 1980s and ‘90s, though he still doesn’t have much of a reputation outside his home country two decades after his death. Case in point, almost none of his 13 features are available in the US, which means this belated American release of MOVING constitutes a major event. MOVING is filmmaking of the highest order: innovative, surprising, beguiling, and, yes, moving. It’s one of those rare movies—like MURIEL (1963), A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE (1976), POSSESSION (1981), or L’INTRUS (2004)—that seems to be discovering itself, and cinema, as it goes along, devising new approaches to storytelling in response to how its volatile characters engage with the world. The film begins as a naturalistic drama about the impact of a couple’s separation on their preadolescent daughter, a headstrong fifth-grader named Renko. But as Renko, or Ren, grapples with the dissolution of her family (as well as her subsequent problems at school, where her parents’ separation makes her a target for bullying), her behavior becomes increasingly unpredictable and reckless—and so too does the story. Gradually everyone around Ren starts behaving impulsively too, as though her tumultuous inner life were being made manifest in the real world; to shake things up more, Sômai frequently makes shocking advances in time, which raise more questions than they answer about the consequences of the characters’ actions. And just when you think MOVING couldn’t get more ambiguous, it starts to become unclear whether what we’re watching is a dream. Per Kurosawa (who served as assistant director on Sômai’s first two features), Sômai favored narratives that progress from order to chaos, and MOVING certainly fits that description. At the same time, Sômai is always in complete control over his art as a filmmaker, trading in impassive long takes that Kurosawa has likened to those of Theo Angelopoulos and Edward Yang. The formal mastery exists in constant tension with the characters’ out-of-control lives, with each one rendering the other strange. It wouldn’t work at all if the actors weren’t up to snuff, and the cast here is extraordinary; everyone seems like a relatable person even when they do things they themselves can’t explain. Tomoko Tabata, who plays Ren, deserves special mention, exhibiting a complexity and mysteriousness that would be astonishing in a performer of any age. (1993, 125 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Ben Sachs]

Charlie Roxburgh’s DON’T LET THE RIVERBEAST GET YOU! (US)

Music Box Theatre – Monday, 9:30pm

For those yet to be initiated into the bizarre micro-cult fandom of Motern Media, the New England-based artistic collective led by Matt Farley and Charlie Roxburgh, DON’T LET THE RIVERBEAST GET YOU! is as ideal an entry point imaginable. Put simply, it’s a masterclass in reorienting one’s cinematic palate around earnest, homegrown moviemaking, with the act of creating something—​quality be damned—​becoming the goal in itself, forever shattering the line between what makes a movie “good” or “bad” and letting barometers of taste go absolutely haywire. At first glance, RIVERBEAST is a run-of-the-mill creature feature about a vast ensemble of eclectic New England characters, led by the best tutor in town, Neil Stuart (Farley) going toe-to-toe with the eponymous beast that dwells in the nearby Merrimack River. But the more the film crawls along, the singular idiosyncrasies that define Farley and Roxburgh’s oeuvre start to become unavoidable: the bizarrely obtuse vocabulary employed by characters, the almost-alien topics of conversation that consume scenes (from the shareability of butternut squash to the myriad uses for kitty litter), the oscillating performance styles ranging from overeagerness to pure boredom, the rhythms and beats of scenes feeling oh-so-slightly out of tune with one another, to the very nature of a film with the word Riverbeast in its title expending more time and energy on a musical number called “The River Mud Shuffle” than actually showcasing said beast. Yet despite all this bizarre craft—​nay, because of it!—​this particular mélange of amateur traits (overwritten dialogue, incongruous plotting, inconsistent lighting and sound) comes together as nothing short of a movie miracle, this ragtag team of artists and friends making something so ridiculous and inexplicable, with each out-of-focus shot and off-balance sound cue dripping with heart and love. You too may find yourself scoffing at first at the inanity of spending so much time on the rules and regulations of the world of tutoring, only to end up cheering during the final battle scene between the Riverbeast and Frank Stone, Former Professional Athlete. It’s only fitting that the main narrative thrust of RIVERBEAST is Farley’s character being ridiculed by his community for believing in something seemingly outsized and ridiculous, only for his beliefs to be proven right in the end. So too may time be kind to the outlandish and inimitable cinema of Matt Farley and Charlie Roxburgh. Sponsored by Shudder and hosted by Music Box of Horrors. (2012, 99 min, Digital Projection) [Ben Kaye]

W.S. Van Dyke's MANHATTAN MELODRAMA (US)

FACETS Cinema – Saturday, 7:30pm

Could one imagine a more poetic miscegenation of Hollywood narrative and sensational materiality? Positioned at the cusp of Prohibition repeal, Hays Code enforcement, and New Deal reform, MANHATTAN MELODRAMA's Cain-and-Abel opposition of bookish lawmaker Jim Wade (William Powell) and suave mobster Blackie Gallagher (Clark Gable) demonstrates the impossibility of removing the figure of the gangster from the national consciousness. Powell's character, standing in for FDR, marries "Eleanor" (Myrna Loy) on his rise to governing prominence; Gable serves as both his criminal foil and loyal admirer—a purely cinematic contradiction: the outlaw advocate of state reform. The film's novel fraternal framework of childhood companions emerging as public enemies (later redeployed in moralist anti-gangster melodramas DEAD END and ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES) had a notable return in the recession of the early 1990s with Warner Brothers' incoherent anti-gangster-revival NEW JACK CITY and the prescient leftist tragicomedy SNEAKERS, which brilliantly displaced the omnipotent mobster and his weaponry onto the startup CEO (Ben Kingsley) armed with an omniscient cryptographic technology. Screening as part of Speakeasy Cinema. This cabaret-style screening treats Chicago film fans to Prohibition-era films, craft cocktails, and with live jazz by Alchemist Connections. Seating is very limited, tickets include 1 drink token, and non-alcoholic options are available. (1934, 93 min, Digital Projection) [Michael Castelle]

Cédric Kahn’s THE GOLDMAN CASE (France)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

The social and political turbulence of the 1960s, during which criminality was as much a philosophy as a means of survival, take center stage in the absorbing courtroom drama THE GOLDMAN CASE. Director and coscreenwriter Cédric Kahn’s award-winning film centers on Pierre Goldman, a left-wing, mentally unstable revolutionary who turned to crime to fund his lifestyle. Goldman was charged with four armed robberies that took place in Paris late in 1969 that netted the robbers thousands of francs and cost two pharmacy workers their lives. He was convicted and sentenced to 12 years behind bars for the robberies and life in prison for the murders. After serving five years, during which he wrote a best-selling memoir, his case was retried on appeal; it is this second trial that is depicted in the film. Kahn and coscreenwriter Nathalie Hertzberg draw from the actual trial transcript to illuminate their volatile central character and the defense attorneys who try, without much success, to moderate his attacks on the police and the norms of the judiciary. The unique aspects of the French judicial system, which have fascinated me since I saw the free-for-all trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus in THE LIFE OF EMILE ZOLA (1937), seem more designed to get at the truth than the American system of relegating juries to the sidelines as silent onlookers. Kahn frequently lines up his camera close behind an observer of the defendant, lawyers, prosecutors, and witnesses, forcing us into the perspective of the jurors trying to decide whether Goldman, who freely admitted to the three nonfatal robberies, was also a murderer. Arieh Worthalter gives a dynamic, unsparing performance as Goldman, an intelligent, charismatic outlaw and son of Jewish refugees from the pogroms in their native Poland who became the darling of the radical chic leftists in France. Arthur Harari is every bit his match as the defense attorney who wants the facts to speak for themselves but who, ultimately, stands with Goldman in his indictment of the antisemitism that led to the murder charge. We may never know if Goldman actually did the killings, as Kahn leaves plenty of room for doubt either way, but in the end, the evidence he reveals seems pretty compelling. (2023, 115 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Les Mayfield’s ENCINO MAN (US)

FACETS Cinema – Thursday, 9pm

Watching Les Mayfield’s directorial debut today feels as though a cinematic artifact from 1992 has been unearthed, fully intact with its male gaze, objectification of women, and jock bullies slinging the F-slur. Yet Mayfield pushes the story a few millennia past the Stone Age. The film follows high school weirdos Dave (Sean Astin) and best bud Stoney (Pauly Shore) who discover a frozen caveman in their backyard. When the caveman thaws, Brandon Fraser’s Link emerges. Hijinx regarding modern life through the eyes of a neanderthal ensue. Initially marketed as a lighthearted teen comedy, 30 years later the film reflects social adaptation, cultural anxieties, and the symbolic role of the outsider. Dave seeks the Holy Grail of teen movies—​not sex, but popularity. From the moment Dave is introduced, he has this singular objective for his senior year of high school. Stoney, however, sees the world differently. He’s not impressed with social hierarchy or typical tropes of a high school teenager represented in film. While Stoney was once seen as a comedic sidekick, today his character is more relatable than Dave. Stoney says how he feels without holding back and his rejection of norms or materialism aligns with early 1990s alternative grunge culture, which celebrated individuality and nonconformity. Stoney teaches Link about fun and freedom, contrasting Dave’s self-serving motives. The two pass Link off as a foreign exchange student and due to his instinctive behavior and lack of social cues, Link is instantly the most desired among Dave and Stoney’s peers. The film’s irony lies in Link—​completely unaware of high school social dynamics—​becoming the most popular student. This underscores Mayfield’s point: modern social structures are arbitrary and superficial. Dave’s hero journey isn’t about his desire to date the prom queen or become most liked, but about accepting himself and embracing selflessness. As the caretakers of Link, Dave and Stoney ensure his well-being in a strange new world, forming a chosen family. In 1992, the idea of community as a family you choose was not a mainstream concept; it was reserved for the marginalized. While Mayfield’s use of a throuple of odd suburban boys may not be the best representation to preach this concept, it was a step forward. Brendan Fraser’s physical comedy as Link—​his exaggerated reactions and movements—​highlights the absurdity of modern life and makes his character endearing. Audiences immediately empathize with Link’s attempts to navigate a foreign world. Mayfield’s hyperreal aesthetic mirrors the heightened reality of teens in a suburban high school setting. The use of vibrant colors, energetic pacing, and a 1990s alt-rock soundtrack roots the film in its time, creating a fun, escapist story with deeper social critique. Link’s journey from prehistory to suburban high school provides for entertaining comedic value, but also creates an insightful lens through which to examine the contradictions of social adaptation, individuality, and the superficiality of cultural norms. It may be an artifact of its time, but maybe the time has come to dig it out of the backyard pool, let it thaw, and see what emerges. Preceding ENCINO MAN is Allison Torem’s short film ROAD HEAD, an absurd comedy set during the peak of pandemic. Two millennials find themselves stranded on their way to a social distance party. By mixing grief, awkward intimacy, and the unease of connecting with someone while keeping your emotions and germs away, Torem reflects on our best and worst social habits to emerge during lockdown. The dialogue mixes humor and existential angst to convey the complexities of modern relationships and shows the lengths people go to avoid an intimacy that’s often needed. Preceded by film trivia at 7pm and Allison Torem’s 2023 short film ROAD HEAD before the feature, with Torem in person. (1992, 88 min, Digital Projection) [Shaun Huhn]

F.W. Murnau's NOSFERATU (Germany/Silent)

Northbrook Public Library – Wednesday, 2pm and 7pm

Like his contemporary Jean Vigo, F.W. Murnau died far too soon. His death in an auto accident cut short the career of a great talent who was reaching new artistic milestones after his arrival in the U.S. He died having directed only three films for Hollywood (not including TABU) and, while he is celebrated among auteurists and cinephiles, his popular reputation never reached the level of other European émigrés like Fritz Lang. David Thomson writes that Murnau had an unparalleled talent for "photograph[ing] the real world and yet invest[ing] it with a variety of poetic, imaginative, and subjective qualities. The camera itself allowed audiences to experience actuality and imagination simultaneously." In the case of NOSFERATU, the result is a vampire story of startling realism. This is no fantasy, nor is it a lush period piece. This is mania, creeping fear, disease, and plague. Perhaps no film better illustrates the difference between dreams, which inhabit the margins of our world, and fantasies, which we each manufacture. Thanks to Murnau's pioneering style here and in later films, directors as diverse as Douglas Sirk and David Lynch have continued to practice a similar alchemy of melodrama, movement, desire, and fateful circumstance. Screening as part of the Silent Film Series with live piano accompaniment by David Drazin. (1922, 94 min, DCP Digital) [Will Schmenner]

🎞️ ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Block Cinema (at Northwestern University)
“Revisiting Films By Women/Chicago ‘74 with Patricia Erens and B. Ruby Rich,”  an evening of short films and discussion with Films By Women/Chicago ‘74 festival organizers B. Ruby Rich and Patricia Erens, takes place Wednesday at 6:30pm. More info here.

⚫ Chicago Film Archives
The Chicago Transit Authority, in partnership with 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.

⚫ Cinema/Chicago
Short Film Showcase: The Wonderfully Weird World of Niki Lindroth von Bahr (2010-2019, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday, 6:30pm, at the Chicago Cultural Center (78 E. Washington St.). Free admission with registration. More info here. 

⚫ Comfort Film at Comfort Station (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave.)
Rachel Kempf and Nick Toti’s 2023 film IT DOESN’T GET ANY BETTER THAN THIS (83 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday at 8pm. Curated and presented for Comfort Film by Jason Coffman. More info here. 

⚫ FACETS Cinema
Chundria Brownlow Film Studios' Short Film Showcase screens Saturday at 11am, though the event is now sold out.

Wei Shujun’s 2023 film ONLY THE RIVER FLOWS (101 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday at 5:30pm and 7:30pm and Sunday at 1pm.

Duane Edwards’ WRONG NUMBERS screens Monday, 7pm, followed by a Q&A. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Rami Younis and Sarah Ema Friedland’s 2023 animated film LYD (78 min, DCP Digital) begins screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes.

Costa-Gavras’ 1969 film Z (127 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday, 6pm, as part of the Democracy at Risk series. 

Jia Ling’s 2024 film YOLO (129 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 6pm, as part of the as part of the Propaganda and Counterculture lecture series. More info on all screenings here. 

⚫ Goethe-Institut Chicago (150 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 420)
Wolfgang Becker’s 2023 film GOODBYE, LENIN! (121 min, Digital Projection) screens Saturday, 6pm, as part of the 70 Years of German Films. Free and open to the public, please register in advance and bring photo ID for check-in. More info here. 

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Music Box Garden Movies continue for one more week. See Venue website for films and showtimes.

Coralie Fargeat’s 2024 film THE SUBSTANCE (140 min, DCP Digital) and Bernardo Britto’s OMNI LOOP (107 min, DCP Digital) begin screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes.

Jim Sharman’s 1975 film THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (100 min, 35mm) screens Friday and Saturday at midnight.

Jane Campion’s 1993 film THE PIANO (120 min, 35mm) screens Sunday, 11:30am, as part of the Chicago International Film Festival Presents: BIG ART FILMS series.

The Chicago Film Archives 20th Anniversary Variety Show screens Tuesday, 7pm, as part of "Out of the Vault at 20," a series of screenings celebrating the 20th anniversary of the founding of CFA. 

Charles Roxburgh’s 2007 film FREAKY FARLEY (83 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 9:30pm, as part of the Music Box of Horrors Presents series. Sponsored by Shudder.

Gregory Nava’s 1997 film SELENA (127 min, 35mm) screens Thursday at 9:45pm. Presented by Ramona Slick and Rated Q - A Celebration of Queer, Camp, & Cult Cinema, with pre-show drinks and a DJ set in the Music Box Lounge at 9pm. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ The Reel Film Club
Gustavo Fallas’ 2023 film LAZARO'S DAUGHTER (90 min, Digital Projection) screens Tuesday, 6pm, at the Instituto Cervantes Chicago (31 W. Ohio St.). More info here.  

⚫ Sideshow Gelato (4819 W. Western Ave.)
SUPER-HORROR-RAMA! presents Clive Barker’s 1995 film LORD OF ILLUSIONS (120 min, Digital Projection) on Wednesday, 7:30pm, as part of a weekly horror gathering and screening series, with a social hour starting at 6pm, a surprise short feature at 6:30pm and live magic from John Sturk, along with trivia and giveaways, at 7pm. More info here. 

⚫ South Side Home Movies
Illinois Humanities and the South Side Home Movie Project present Chicago Style: Film & Fashion Show, a multidimensional exploration of Black fashion on Chicago’s South Side from the 1930s through the 80s, on Saturday, 3pm, at the Greenline Performing Arts Center (329 E. Garfield Blvd.). Includes the debut of an archival film curated and scored by Ayana Contreras selections from South Side Home Movie Project’s Jean Patton, Ramon Williams and Roberts Family Collections. More info here. 

⚫ Sweet Void Cinema (3036 W. Chicago Ave.)
Find more information on the Humboldt Park microcinema, including its full screening and workshop schedule, here. 

CINE-LIST: September 20 - September 26, 2024

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Michael Castelle, Maxwell Courtright, Marilyn Ferdinand, Shaun Huhn, Ben Kaye, Nicky Ni, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Elise Schierbeek, Will Schmenner, Olivia Hunter Willke