📽️ THE 60TH CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
The 60th Chicago International Film Festival takes place through Sunday, October 27, at various venues throughout the city with each indicated with their respective screening below. Select films and programs reviewed here; note that the shorts programs will be available to stream virtually. Full schedule and more info here.
Elizabeth Lo’s MISTRESS DISPELLER (China/US/Documentary)
AMC NEWCITY 14 (1500 N. Clybourn Ave., c30) – Friday, 1pm
A shockingly intimate documentary, MISTRESS DISPELLER highlights a new industry on the rise in China. With the goal of keeping couples together, a "mistress dispeller" can be hired to infiltrate family dynamics and bring harmony back to marriages flailing due to infidelity. Featuring the challenges of modern relationships, dating, marriage, family, and loneliness, the film creates space for everyone involved, demonstrating sincere empathy for all sides of the love triangle. MISTRESS DISPELLER follows a couple, Mr. and Mrs. Li, as the wife reaches out to Teacher Wang, a mistress dispeller who skillfully inserts herself into their dynamic, discovering the innermost details of the relationships involved to save the marriage; her purpose, however, expands to helping everyone, including the mistress. The film insightfully draws connections between personal relationships and larger cultural norms and expectations. Frank conversations, shot with arresting stillness, many featuring close-ups, are juxtaposed with lingering shots of Chinese art, landscapes, and cityscapes. Throughout, as well, there are interludes with images of new brides, lonely hearts ads, dating seminars, and matchmaking services, illuminating the cultural pressures that exist in finding and maintaining successful relationships—so much so that industries spring up to fill the need. What is most surprising is how director Elizabeth Lo got everyone involved to agree to willingly participate; a fact she is clear to emphasize with text at the beginning of MISTRESS DISPELLER. The result is true cinematic melodrama in documentary form. (2024, 94 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
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Jason Park's TRANSPLANT (US)
AMC NEWCITY 14 (1500 N. Clybourn Ave., c30) – Friday, 7:30pm and Saturday, 2:15pm
In most medical dramas, the desire and know-how to heal others often comes at great personal expense. The ostensible benevolence of the doctor, at least as a fictional figure, is always littered with complexes and schisms between professional and personal needs. Jason Park plays on these tensions well in his debut feature TRANSPLANT, which follows promising surgical resident Jonah Yoon (Eric Nam) as he muscles his way into studying under Edward Harmon (Bill Camp), one of the best heart transplant surgeons in the world. While plenty of detail is given to Jonah’s personal history with his family (his father died before he could become a doctor himself, his mother has serious kidney disease but must continue working to help push Jonah across the finish line of his residency), most of this is dressing, setting up stakes that feel received and ornamental rather than a real driving force for Jonah’s actions. The film’s narrative stakes really rest on the growing psychological tension between Jonah and Harmon, and the question this forces of what type of healer Jonah really wants to be. Despite the care the film takes to set up a textured protagonist with a sympathetic background, Bill Camp is the standout reason to see TRANSPLANT. The longtime character actor puts his basso profundo and soft menace to good use as the quasi-villain, and it’s the constant fine-tuning of his maybe-benevolence that gives the film its dramatic juice. The dynamic is more textured than its predictable WHIPLASH comparisons would lead you to expect; despite his own shifting moral commitment, you quickly realize Camp actually respects Yoon quite a bit, and he’s trying to draw him into his megalomaniacal orbit rather than squash him. A closer analogue would be the STAR WARS films, where the natural gift of the protégée is a given, and the narrative question is to what ends he applies it. It’s a rare amount of screen time for one of our most reliable but unheralded character actors, and he savors every moment of it. Stylistically, the film’s color palette is warm and cold in all the right places, and rather streaming-ready, but this fits with the ethos of the film; TRANSPLANT is about precision and a sort of forced confrontation between technical mastery and human error and emotion. Even the film’s flashes of medical gore (if you’re squeamish, be advised) feel contained in this setting, pathologies existing mostly to be studied. If the (literally) clinical approach feels icky, that’s precisely the point, and the film’s calculated lead performances make sure the ethical questions are molded into compelling drama. (2024, 93 min, DCP Digital) [Maxwell Courtright]
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David Fortune's COLOR BOOK (US)
AMC NEWCITY 14 (1500 N. Clybourn Ave., c30) – Friday, 8pm
Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts (915 E. 60th St.) – Saturday, 1pm
There’s a tension you can feel when watching a narrative about disability. Given the history of even the most well-meaning attempts to portray people with intellectual disabilities often lapsing into condescension, it can feel like a breath of fresh air just to see a film treat the subject neutrally. Thankfully, moving as it is, David Fortune’s COLOR BOOK walks its fine line with grace, treating its characters’ relationship with a tenderness that never becomes maudlin. Reeling from the death of his wife Tammy, widower Lucky (William Catlett) and his 11-year-old son Mason (Jeremiah Daniels) are left to pick up the pieces. We don’t see much of Tammy outside of a brief prologue, and we get the impression that, while loving Mason unconditionally, Lucky is still learning the ins and outs of parenting that came more naturally to his late wife. Mason has Down syndrome and struggles to express himself, especially in the face of indescribable grief. When Lucky’s friend offers to get the father and son into a baseball game, Lucky takes him up on the offer only to get caught up in numerous trials on the day-long odyssey to get there. But even in the film’s most tense moments, nearly every character (a bum car seller notwithstanding) is guided by an innate goodness. It’s like a feel-good variation on the social mechanics that drive a Dardennes or Safdie brothers film, where the variable characters that could make or break the men's journey always choose grace. The tension, where it exists, comes mostly from Lucky’s difficulty with communication or assumptions that things might go wrong when they never ultimately do; the world is an ultimately safe and forgiving place for the weary duo. Beautifully framing Lucky and Mason’s relationship, DP Nikolaus Summerer’s black and white photography should share top billing in the film, employing Atlanta location shots that feel both specific and generalizable. While the father-son relationship feels true-to-life in many ways, other elements of their shared life and background are either completely generic (constant references to "the game," for instance, never elaborate further on who might be playing, though one assumes it’s the Braves) or left to the imagination, so that the film becomes a more universal series of tableaux, two men picking up the pieces in the spare architecture of their home and community. The emotion is handsomely wrung from every word and gesture, the film radiating with love in every frame. (2024, 105 min, DCP Digital) [Maxwell Courtright]
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Bernhard Wenger’s PEACOCK (Austria/Germany)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday, 8:15pm
The tragic irony of the life of Matthias (Albrecht Schuch) is how brilliantly he knows how to be literally anyone else but himself. As the most favorable client at My Companion, a Vienna-based "friend-for-hire" agency, Matthias can step in to whatever role you need him to play; maybe he's your social companion at cultural events around the city, or your doting son at your upcoming sixtieth birthday celebration, or even someone to coach you through relationship troubles. It’s that last one that gets especially tricky, for as colorful and expressive as Matthias can be on the job, he’s practically a blank canvas in his home life, to the point where things between him and his partner Sophia (Julia Franz Richter) have arrived at a disastrous breaking point. Bernhard Wenger’s debut feature has a distinct short story-esque feeling to it, painting in broad strokes about concrete themes and values, doing so with notably stylish editing and production design, frames meticulously assembled and eye-catching. Wenger fills his story with endless notable sequences, from an opening image of a golf cart on fire, to the frequent and deliberate use of animals throughout, from dogs of all sizes, to hordes of ducks, to the eponymous peacock wandering through a meditation garden. Just like that feathered friend, Matthias finds that his whole lot in life is nothing more than performance after performance, to the point where—in the film’s messy and bombastic finale—his own attempt at true personal expression is deemed nothing more than an act. For Matthias, for better or worse, all the world’s a stage. (2024, 102 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
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Farahnaz Sharifi's MY STOLEN PLANET (Germany/Iran/Documentary)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 2:30pm and Thursday, 3:30pm
“The first blow of revolution lands on the bodies of women.” Farahnaz Sharifi opens MY STOLEN PLANET with Super 8 home movies and a picture of a jam-packed crowd of women protesting against mandatory veiling in 1979 after the Iranian Revolution, and she closes the film with them as well. She was born just three weeks after the Revolution; her young smiling self in the picture only vaguely knew how her life would be divided, that she would need to fight to protect what’s hers—her happiness, her planet. Mapping her journey of becoming a filmmaker and an "addicted" filmer—she would film everything after getting a digital camera—with that of Iranian women’s decades-long struggle for freedom, Sharifi’s diaristic film can’t sew together the split of womanhood (one wearing hijab in the public, one not, in the warmth of a private and domestic space). She also started to collect films: home movies, celebrations, anything that hasn’t been destroyed or confiscated by authorities. We observe her stubborn obsession in excavating or extrapolating stories behind faces unbeknownst to her, snippets from somebody else’s planet, fragile, wholesome, fully alive. This footage is interwoven with hers: friendly gatherings, dancing, singing, hiding from the police, all in yearning and resistance. The details are touching: close-ups of the dancing feet; the dancing bodies through reflection or in the shade. And there are videos of the dancing first responders in PPE; piercing videos of journalists at protests who kept the cameras rolling until they were shot by security forces, blood spilling on the lens. She fights against a collective amnesia as we see her aging mom living with Alzheimer’s is quietly losing her memory. Through her lens, and through footage by her friends and comrades who risk their lives to document protests and violent oppression—who as they say are "the archivists of death"—we see the determination, indestructible friendship, and true grit of the people we call filmmakers. (2024, 83 min, DCP Digital) [Nicky Ni]
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Joel Potrykus’ VULCANIZADORA (US)
AMC NEWCITY 14 (1500 N. Clybourn Ave., c30) – Saturday, 2:30pm
For those hungry to seek out what could be described as “feel-bad cinema,” indie master Joel Potrykus’ latest exercise in expert, torturous minimalism will more than sate that bummer pit in your stomach. Potrykus made a name for himself in the 2010s for his down-and-dirty microbudget features exploring contemporary male rage and anxiety, whether it be a stand-up comic whose artistic pitfalls and anger issues become one and the same (APE [2012]), a young man channeling his addiction issues through delusions of alchemical grandeur (THE ALCHEMIST COOKBOOK [2016]), or a late-'90s slacker whose response to shifting global and personal change is to literally remain bound to his couch for all of eternity (RELAXER [2018]). After a six-year break between features, Potrykus’ latest is the work of an artist growing and evolving, building upon his thematic instincts in exciting, mature fashion, but still retaining the punk, anarchic spirit that made his work so indelible in the first place. Here, in a sequel-of-sorts to his sophomore feature, BUZZARD (2014), two friends approaching middle age (Potrykus himself, alongside frequent collaborator Joshua Burge) journey into the local woods, at first engaging in violently juvenile behavior (shooting bottle rockets, hitting sticks against trees, indulging in excessive drinking), before the real purpose of their hike emerges in a dreary and frightening fashion. To reveal more of what transpires in VULCANIZADORA would eliminate much of the joyful and sickly surprise of Potrykus’ sleek and muddy feature, but themes of suicide, depression, disillusionment, and male arrested development unfold across the tight sub-ninety-minute runtime, exploring the fractured bond between two men struggling to figure out how their respective loneliness and fear can (or should) exist in the world. Though no prior viewing of BUZZARD is necessary to appreciate the experience here, there is something additionally depressing about the gleeful anger of Burge’s character from that feature reemerging here as a shell of his former self, the life sapped from his eyes with a lumbering, ominous weight. Potrykus keeps his feature aloft with sumptuous 16mm footage of crunchy autumnal forest floors and seemingly endless lakes, underscored with a soundtrack bold and eclectic enough to include both Maria Callas and Pantera. It’s a testament to how expansive Potrykus has become as an artist, still able to access his particular brand of anxious, hellish antics while still grasping for what else lies under the sun. And even within a film as dire as this one, Potrykus offers some hope that there is still time to escape the traps of despair we build for ourselves. (2024, 85 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
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Hirokazu Kore-eda's SHOPLIFTERS (Japan)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 2:45pm
Coming home after a day spent shoplifting, a man and a boy see a young girl playing by herself outside an apartment and decide to take her home with them. Their household is presided over by an elderly woman, along with two younger women, one of whom has a relationship with the man. Their home is a ramshackle corrugated lean-to, perpetually in danger of being demolished by a local property flipper. They get by on various grifts and scams to supplement the meager salaries of the grownups’ menial jobs and the old lady’s pension. Each member of this makeshift family does their best to play the part they wish they had in their previous lives. I kept thinking of Dickens’ Oliver Twist while watching this movie. There’s a lot of Fagin in the man and of the Artful Dodger in the boy; the grubby neediness of their lives is out of Dickens as well. In his careful and unassuming way, Kore-eda has made a devastating indictment of capitalist society, as well as the sacrosanct place the nuclear family holds within its structures. He continues plumbing the depth and breadth of what connects one human being to another through this group of strangers—unwanted or rejected by their relations and by the larger world—who throw in their lots together to form a bond made by choice rather than blood. This one left me gutted. Kore-eda in person. (2018, 121 min, DCP Digital) [Dmitry Samarov]
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Alonso Ruizpalacios’s LA COCINA (Mexico/US)
AMC NEWCITY 14 (1500 N. Clybourn Ave., c30) – Saturday, 8pm and Sunday, 7:15pm
National Museum of Mexican Art (1852 W. 19th St.) – Monday, 6:30pm
As a screenwriter and director, Alonso Ruizpalacios has been deeply engaged in the culture and history of his home town, Mexico City. His last film, the engrossing quasi-documentary A COP MOVIE (2021), told a true story through fictive means as part of its indictment of policing in Mexico’s capital. For his latest film, LA COCINA, Ruizpalacios breaks from his home country to look at the Mexican diaspora. He has taken a 1957 English play, Arnold Wesker’s The Kitchen, and adapted it as a melodrama that takes aim at U.S. immigration policy, exploitative capitalism, and kitchen culture through the experiences of undocumented workers in New York City. We think we will be identifying with a young Mexican woman named Estela (Anna Díaz), who opens the film by crossing into Manhattan to find a restaurant named The Grill (likely modeled on The Capital Grille chain) and a line cook named Pedro (Raúl Briones, one of the stars of A COP MOVIE) who holds the promise of a job in the restaurant’s kitchen. Very quickly, the film becomes the story of Pedro’s unraveling, as his volatile emotions, cultural alienation, and affair with a güera waitress (Rooney Mara) set him on a collision course with his boss, his coworkers, and, most especially, himself. Ruizpalacios films mainly in black and white, with well-chosen moments of monochromatic color, and does a superb job of creating a shared environment of anger, camaraderie, and petty oppression among the kitchen staff and front-of-house workers. Indeed, his filming of the lunch service at the restaurant is almost baroque in its frenzied choreography of movement and shouted orders. The director is occasionally heavy-handed with his symbolism, and several long speeches and poetic non sequiturs reveal the film’s stage origins. Nonetheless, the performances of the entire ensemble—and this really is an ensemble work that brought Lanford Wilson’s play Balm in Gilead to mind—really get under one’s skin. (2024, 139 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Jules Rosskam's DESIRE LINES (US)
AMC New City 14 (1500 N. Clybourn Ave., c30) – Saturday, 8:30pm and Monday, 2:15pm
We first meet DESIRE LINES’ protagonist Ahmad (Aden Hakimi) by adopting his POV, the camera roving through a gay bathhouse that eventually reveals itself as the archive he’s visiting for a vague "personal" project. Ahmad, like all of the subjects of Jules Rosskam’s docufiction film, is a gay trans man, and he has come to the archive to learn more about the cruising lifestyle that he never got to experience firsthand. Ahmad meets and eventually grows smitten with his younger archival assistant Kieran (Theo Germaine), as his search is intercut with documentary interviews with other gay trans men about their lived experiences and sexual awakenings. As the film stacks on themes and material to be a sort of ur-portrait of the modern gay trans man, it mounts a sophisticated exploration of the gaze; as laid out in the film’s opening shot where the cruising camera sizes up, and is alternately sized up or avoided altogether by the various congregants of the bathhouse it passes, these interpersonal gazes eventually transcend time as we see Ahmad pouring over material about them, archival searches doubling as a sort of voyeurism that blends the carnal and historical. While the staged material is affecting, it’s the interviews that ground the film as an intellectual project. One subject who refers to himself as a “professional trans person” speaks about his body being intellectualized rather than desired in gender discourse, honing in on the dichotomy the film seems to be exploring with its docufiction balance. Whether the film achieves a really embodied desire is up to the viewer to decide; the fictional sections have a sort of soundstage sterility to them, their Brechtian flatness like an extension of this same project, something "necessary" for understanding the desire at play but still feeling in some ways secondhand, amalgamated from the nonfiction material with which it shares screentime. Central to all of this is Lou Sullivan, one of if not the first public advocate for gay trans men. Rosskam interpolates interview footage with Sullivan, framing him as a key part of this whole archive, a trailblazing figure from whom all future trans men draw from in some way. While treating Sullivan as the literal first ftm to ever exist would be reductive, the material speaks to the power of representation, and the role that Sullivan has played in the life of so many trans men since his public appearances and writing in the '70s and '80s. He was and still is a beacon with the power to unlock self-actualization in others. In one scene, Kiernan instructively invokes Derrida’s concept of the "desire for the archive": many need to find the historical origin of, and thus possess a moment or a feeling as a way to make sense of the self. It’s an ongoing desire for queer and trans people, in a world that is still slowly discovering and rebuilding the history of LGBTQ people from the scraps left us by forbearers wiped out by disease, violence, and repression. For its part, DESIRE LINES is a building block that extends this work, as well as the work of Full Spectrum Features, the film’s production company that’s become a pillar of Chicago queer filmmaking in recent years. (2024, 83 min, DCP Digital) [Maxwell Courtright]
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Péter Kerekes’s WISHING ON A STAR (Italy/Austria/Croatia/Slovakia/Czech Republic)
AMC NEWCITY 14 (1500 N. Clybourn Ave., c30) – Sunday, 3:15pm and Monday, 2:30pm
You might be forgiven for thinking that Slovak filmmaker Péter Kerekes’s new film, WISHING ON A STAR, is fiction—and in many ways it is—but this comic gem is a documentary focused on professional astrologer Luciana de Leoni D’Asparedo and the people she helps find themselves through a process developed by Italian astrologer Ciro Discepolo called active astrology. Kerekes films Leoni D’Asparedo as she tries to help a wide variety of people who come to her with a particular problem. She interviews them, asks them what they really want, and then finds the place their chart indicates they need to go on their birthday to find the best astrological alignment to fulfill their heart’s desire. A butcher’s wife looking to rekindle the love she had with her husband is told Anchorage is where she can put things right; when this journey is impossible, she does a virtual trip by getting a human-size plush polar bear, a room air conditioner, and buckets of ice to put her in an Anchorage kind of mood. A woman angry with her absentee father goes to Taiwan, works out her aggressions in a virtual shooting gallery, and returns to Italy to reconnect with him. The problems of the random strangers Kerekes chose to be a part of his film mostly involve a lack of love and connection, and he finds ways to incorporate amusing situations into their pilgrimages, such as having identical twin sisters sunning in Beirut with a whole row of identical twins. When Leoni D’Asparedo, who already knows what she wishes to do, comes under the scrutiny of her astrologer-in-training daughter, she manipulates the reading to reflect her “destiny.” This heartfelt film is a fascinating look at what, at its deepest level, it means to be human. (2024, 99 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Max Kestner’s LIFE AND OTHER PROBLEMS (Denmark/UK/Sweden/Documentary)
AMC NEWCITY 14 (1500 N. Clybourn Ave., c30) – Sunday, 4:45pm
Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, 1:30pm
This discursive documentary takes as its jumping-off point the controversial decision made by Copenhagen Zoo in 2014 to euthanize a healthy two-year-old giraffe because his genetic makeup was overrepresented in the captive giraffe population. Because the people who ran the zoo regarded the “problem” of life as biological in this case, they saw the solution as clear-cut and had no issue with proceeding; however, when the word got out of their plan to euthanize the animal, people around the world protested, arguing that the giraffe’s life was worth preserving at any cost. Documentarian Max Kestner considers both sides of the argument in LIFE AND OTHER PROBLEMS via interviews with the zoo authorities and vintage news footage of protesters; he also profiles various scientists to get their views on what defines life, consciousness, and fulfilling existence. The more Kestner investigates these subjects, the less straightforward they seem—vacillating between philosophical, biological, genetic, and sometimes purely emotional perspectives, he finds value in all of them, and this holistic approach can be genuinely thought-provoking. In the film’s less compelling sections, Kestner tries to connect his new discoveries to his own life, namely his feelings surrounding his youngest daughter moving out of the family home. These passages may be mawkish, but they don’t detract from the fascinating discussions of how we orient ourselves in relation to life on this planet. (2024, 99 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Rúnar Rúnarsson’s WHEN THE LIGHT BREAKS (Iceland/Netherlands/Croatia/France)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 5pm
AMC NEWCITY 14 (1500 N. Clybourn Ave., c30) – Monday, 5:30pm
Winner of the New Directors Silver Hugo at both the 2011 and 2015 Chicago International Film Festival for his films VOLCANO and SPARROWS, respectively, Icelandic director/screenwriter Rúnnar Rúnarsson is back again with WHEN THE LIGHT BREAKS, a somber story of grief among college-age students attending art school in Reykjavík. Una (Elín Hall) and Diddi (Baldur Einarsson), who both study performance art and play in a band together, have fallen in love. As the film opens, Diddi is planning to fly to his hometown in northern Iceland to break up with his girlfriend, Klara (Katla Njálsdóttir), so he and Una can be open about their relationship. When his flight is cancelled, he borrows a car to make the trip, but gets caught in a horrific, fiery pile-up that claims many lives. The rest of the film deals with Una, Klara, and a small group of friends who come together to try to process their loss. Rúnarsson has taken great care to make his shots as artful as possible. He makes good use of Reykjavík as a backdrop to the action, and frequent mirror images are interesting, particularly when he has Una’s and Klara’s faces merge on either side of a glass window, suggesting their dual role in Diddi’s life. Other images feel a bit pretentious, for example, his final image of a rising sun and its suggestion that “tomorrow is another day.” Despite witnessing such an emotionally charged story, I didn’t feel especially engaged with the characters’ grief, but I do think the actors, particularly Hall, gave it their all. This is a solid, if somewhat stolid, film. (2024, 82 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Clarissa Campolina & Sérgio Borges’ SUÇUARANA (Brazil)
AMC NEWCITY 14 (1500 N. Clybourn Ave., c30) – Sunday, 5:45pm and Monday, 5:15pm
One day, Dora, who appears to be in her late 20s or early 30s, finds an old picture of her mother standing in a beautiful glen; on the back is written “in the valley of Suçuarana.” She decides she wants to go there, and so she packs up her few belongings and sets off in search of this place, not knowing its exact location. She boards a cross-country bus, goes as far as she’s permitted for $30, then begins to hitchhike. As the Brazilian drama SUÇUARANA unfolds, it becomes clear that this is not the first time Dora has hit the road impulsively; in fact, it seems like she has been itinerant for most of her adult life, stopping only when she needs to find work and save a little money. Dora may remind you of Mona, the heroine of Agnès Varda’s great narrative feature VAGABOND (1985), and directors Clarissa Campolina and Sérgio Borges invite further comparison with Varda’s film with their lyrical yet nonjudgmental approach. Dora is an enigmatic character—tough but vulnerable, emotional yet unreadable—and the filmmakers honor her mystery, withholding information about her until she divulges it herself. In a surprising development, SUÇUARANA stops being a road movie in its second half, when Dora sets down in a factory town where the factory owners have gone, leaving the workers to fend for themselves. Campolina and Borges find sadness and wonderment in this community of abandoned workers; their camaraderie is bittersweet because, once they finish tearing apart the factory and selling the metal for scrap, there will be no more money to make in this town and everyone will have to leave. In this development, the factory workers now have quite a bit in common with Dora, the tough reality being that many of us are just one catastrophe away from being itinerant ourselves. (2024, 84 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Ivan Dixon's THE SPOOK WHO SAT BY THE DOOR (US)
Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts (915 E. 60th St.) – Sunday, 6:30pm
Chicago History Museum (1601 N. Clark St.) – Wednesday, 7:30pm
THE SPOOK WHO SAT BY THE DOOR, based on the book by native Chicagoan and committed Marxist Sam Greenlee, who also wrote the film’s screenplay, chronicles the activities of the portentously named Dan Freeman (Lawrence Cook). Freeman is one of a cohort of all-male black applicants to a CIA affirmative action program foisted upon the agency by U.S. senators who are more worried about approval ratings than equality. The cohort of hopefuls doesn’t realize that their white trainers will use every opportunity to eliminate them from contention. In the end, only Freeman has made the grade. He is appointed section chief of reproduction services, aka photocopying, and remains with the agency for five years before returning to his native Chicago. Then the real purpose of his CIA stint becomes clear—to use the skills he acquired to recruit and train guerrilla freedom fighters in all the major urban centers in the country to battle Whitey to a standstill and force the Establishment to grant black Americans freedom in exchange for safe and peaceful streets. Greenlee provides a graphic depiction of the lumpenproletariat rising up against their bourgeois oppressors. After first establishing Freeman as a charismatic leader who can win respect with his muscles as well as his brains, the film shows him recruiting his former gang, the Cobras, to be his first platoon of revolutionaries. Ivan Dixon, perhaps best known as one of the POWs on the TV series Hogan’s Heroes (1965–1971), had a full career as an actor and TV director. His only two feature film assignments, TROUBLE MAN (1972) and SPOOK, came during the short window of opportunity for independently produced “Blaxploitation” films, and both films balance intelligence and aspiration with the more common elements of sex and violence. Dixon shoots parallel scenes and dialogue of Freeman training his men as he was trained at The Farm, a still-relevant example of American forces opportunistically training people who just as opportunistically will turn on them some day. The film has no real place for women as active fighters, but Dahomey Queen (Paula Kelly), a black prostitute with whom Freeman hooks up during his CIA training, becomes an invaluable informer. In 2012, SPOOK was added to the National Film Registry as a “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” American film. Faced with the violence against the black community that we know is absolutely real from recent events, Freeman’s desperate actions “to be free,” as he puts it, are likely to be met with a good deal of sympathy from a large portion of today’s audiences. (1973, 102 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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THE RETURN OF THE PROJECTIONIST (France/Germany)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 8:15pm
AMC NEWCITY 14 (1500 N. Clybourn Ave., c30) – Monday, 12pm
Can a fiction-perfect story about the love of cinema, with all its twists and turns, be in fact a documentary? THE RETURN OF THE PROJECTIONIST by Azerbaijani Orkhan Aghazadeh is that. A rare gem, a film so close to life that it transcends to a timeless allegory for the cinephiles. In the village of Sym, a rural part of Azerbaijan bordering Iran, Samid, an elderly man who was once a projectionist, teams up with Ayaz, a techy teenager from the same village. What binds this lovely intergenerational friendship is their shared love for film. Samid slowly puts together a Soviet-era projector, hoping that one day he could screen a film for all the residents of his village; the only things he’s missing are the light bulbs. Winter goes and summer comes. Ayaz, on the other hand, uses his free time to make an animation on his smartphone and hopes he could submit it to a film festival. Ayaz hunts wi-fi signals on the hill to help Samid order the light bulbs online from Lithuania; Samid, on the other hand, is the other half of Ayaz’s film crew, live and voice acting, making sound Foleys with an abandoned pipeline that chimes with a tragedy only to be revealed later. The screening date draws near, but there’s no sign that the light bulbs are coming, and Samid’s fellow villagers grow skeptical. Director Orkhan Aghazadeh uses compelling cinematic language to make a film about the making of films: subjects are frequently beautifully framed by foreground door frames or dainty windows like tales within tales. In one scene, Aghazadeh’s camera films Ayaz’s camera that photographs Samid posing in front of his projector. Our anticipation for the duo mirrors their anticipation for their collaborative projects. And as in all memorable stories, there are ups and downs. Time smooths out the creases of misfortune; or it never does. When Ayaz rephotographs the few personal and family photos Samid has to make the event poster, a series of photos were laid out one by one, a life of a projectionist, a migrant, a husband, a father who has lost his son… Samid’s life unfolds in snapshots. They brainstorm for a title for the screening event and land on “The Return of the Projectionist.” “That sounds like a movie title,” Samid quips. And thus a film goes on. (2024, 88 min, DCP Digital) [Nicky Ni]
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Trương Minh Quý’s VIET AND NAM (Vietnam)
AMC NEWCITY 14 (1500 N. Clybourn Ave., c30) – Wednesday, 2pm and Thursday, 8:15pm
In the pitch-black barrenness of a coal mine, in the bowels of the earth, two young men share tender kisses and caresses. Their lean, naked bodies smeared with soot and sweat, the coal glistens behind them like stars as time seems to hang in suspension. They are the titular characters of VIET AND NAM, Trương Minh Quý’s meditative, spectral tone poem on the lingering national trauma that reverberates—spiritually and physically—in the hearts of Vietnam and its people. Trauma has a way of rupturing the normal flow of things, dismantling one’s sense of time and unity; although a news bite about the 9/11 US terrorist attacks places VIET AND NAM at a certain date, the film’s near-continuous invocation of memories of war, sacrifice, and bereavement give it the destabilizing feeling of being in a state of constant temporal recursion. Following from that, Trương never delineates which of his characters is Viet and which is Nam, inviting us to read them as a chiastic unit through which intimacy and angst are psychically and somatically intertwined. Sharing and fueling their angst are one of the men’s mothers, who lost her husband during the war and is using her dreams as a guide to find his missing body; and her brother, who fought with and ostensibly witnessed her husband’s death. In static master shots that often evoke the tropical reveries of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, characters in damp rooms and becalmed forests stolidly relay their pain as if they were channels for a collective, primordial anguish; at one point, an actual psychic medium is enlisted, and her blanched face, gagged in horror, briefly cuts through the film’s placidity. If there is hope to be found in the overwhelming sorrow of VIET AND NAM, it is indeed in the relationship of the titular duo, an improbably blooming romance born in a place littered with corpses. (2024, 129 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
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Rachel Elizabeth Seed’s A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY (US/Documentary)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Wednesday, 2:30pm and Thursday, 8:30pm
A particular audio clip of French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson is used twice in A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY. In it, he comments on the art of photography, stating, “Life is once forever.” Rachel Elizabeth Seed’s personal documentary is about many things: photography, memory, archive, time, loneliness. It is mostly, however, about loss and how media can both mitigate and highlight that loss; that perhaps it can allow for time to extend and the past to be revisited or revived. The film is focused on the fascinating life and pioneering work of photographer and journalist Sheila Turner-Seed, the filmmaker’s mother. She passed away in 1979, when the director was only 18 months old, and Seed is driven to learn more about the mother she barely knew. In the process, A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY becomes as much about her as her mother, and Seed’s own art and personal life becomes blended within the subject matter. Seed continually recognizes the mirroring between her life and her mother’s; they also look and sound very much alike, blurring the audience’s understanding of the two women. Through Turner-Seed’s interviews with the world’s most famous photographers—like Gordon Parks—the art and history of the medium throughout midcentury America is also threaded throughout, all intertwined into the personal experiences of the Seeds. It’s intimate and affecting, with Seed’s voiceover mingling with archival audio of her mother. What is most honest about the film is how Seed grapples with the way in which these archival items—her mother’s writing, audio, photos—are all windows into the past and yet limited in their scope. Seed remarks while watching a home video of her mother speaking to her as a baby that the audio and movement aspect allow her to recall the event not as media but as memory—"real" memory. The documentary questions the relationship between memory and media, that both are recordings and neither can ever be the whole truth, and that they can influence one another, creating something new. A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY argues there is absolutely illumination to be found in the extensive media archive, but there’s also a melancholy to learning more—that it is a tease of what might have been and is still nowhere near enough to make up for grief and loss. (2024, 87 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
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Scandar Copti’s HAPPY HOLIDAYS (Palestine/Germany/France/Italy/Qatar)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Wednesday, 5:15pm
AMC NEWCITY 14 (1500 N. Clybourn Ave., c30) – Thursday, 11:30am
Political and social realities in contemporary Israel lead to the secrets and lies at the heart of Palestinian director Scandar Copti’s urgently relevant HAPPY HOLIDAYS. Some 15 years after Copti made his feature film debut with AJAMI (2009), a film in five episodes about a mixed Muslim and Christian community in Tel Aviv, the director reprises his approach with four chapters unfolding in RASHOMON-like fashion that center around two Israeli families, one Jewish, the other (possibly Christian) Arab, and the internal and external conflicts that cause unhappiness all around. Arab siblings Fifi (Manar Shehab) and Rami (Toufic Danial) both cross lines alien to their parents’ older generation. Fifi, who attends school in Jerusalem, goes to discos, socializes with Jews, and dresses as she pleases. Rami is dating Shirley (Shani Dhari), a Jew who reneges on her promise to get an abortion when she finds herself pregnant with Rami’s child. He is also dealing with his father’s (Imad Hourani) embezzlement from the family company that might force the sale of their house, a move violently opposed by Rami’s mother, Hanan (Wafaa Aoun). A minor car accident in which Fifi is involved threatens to reveal a secret she does not want her parents to know when Hanan pursues her daughter’s medical record in order to put in an insurance claim that will save the family home. The expectations of parents and the seeming impossibility of cross-cultural or liberated romantic involvements push many of the characters in HAPPY HOLIDAYS into unethical conduct. The style of the film seems deliberately obfuscating, forcing us to try to parse the various plot threads that give up their secrets only gradually. In addition, almost throwaway scenes, such as a very short moment in which Fifi crosses from her Arab neighborhood through a IDF checkpoint, telegraph the daily life of a divided nation. There are some moments of real horror when we realize that Jewish children in a school where Fifi works as an aide are being indoctrinated to feel assailed and in need of protection (“Bibi” is a protector named by a couple of children); while there is truth to this lesson, it reduces the chances that many Jews will ever feel safe. As if we ever do. (2024, 123 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Ramon Zürcher’s THE SPARROW IN THE CHIMNEY (Switzerland)
AMC NEWCITY 14 (1500 N. Clybourn Ave., c30) – Wednesday, 5:45pm and Thursday, 7:45pm
I watched THE SPARROW IN THE CHIMNEY twice in two days, not because I wanted to, but because I felt that I had to. Writer-director Ramon Zürcher (THE STRANGE LITTLE CAT, THE GIRL AND THE SPIDER) has such an unusual way of presenting characters—and he has quite a few to present here—that his approach obfuscates how they’re related. Few, if any, of the people in this movie are formally introduced; they simply pop up in the mise-en-scène and disappear just as suddenly. Zürcher likes to observe his characters as if they were bacteria, placing them in small, confined spaces and seeing how they bounce off and against each other—his approach feels like Robert Bresson directing the stateroom sequence in A NIGHT AT THE OPERA (1935). Like Bresson, Zürcher’s aesthetic is exacting and fragmented (he’s definitely a director for whom a shot is a frame and not a window), though he has an impish sense of humor that keeps his work unpredictable and witty. It would be unfair to divulge the plot of THE SPARROW IN THE CHIMNEY, since the kick of watching the film is in piecing it together, coming to understand who’s who and why they’re in the same place. Without giving too much away, I’ll say that the setting is a large suburban home, and the principal characters are a middle-aged woman, her sister, and their husbands and children, who range in age from infancy to young adulthood. One adolescent girl—a compulsive liar who may have oppositional defiant disorder—grabs the spotlight with her openly manipulative behavior; she’s probably the most interesting expression of the movie’s theme of intergenerational animosity. Most of the onscreen behavior in THE SPARROW AND THE CHIMNEY is fairly unpleasant, though it sometimes takes a while for the nastiness to sink in—the surface tone is just so placid and curious. Still, one gets a sense of how uncomfortable the family relations are even before the big picture comes into view, as the rich, nuanced performances hint at lifetimes of experience that go largely unspoken. (2024, 117 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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THE BALLAD OF SUZANNE CÉSAIRE (US)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 5:45pm
Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s debut feature THE BALLAD OF SUZANNE CÉSAIRE is a series of little whirlwinds that stir up your dream. They swirl in most electrifying colors and subside swiftly, waking you up and leaving you wondering if the feeling you just felt was really real. Akin to Stanley Kwan’s CENTER STAGE (1991) in the approach of offering an indistinguishable mélange of reality and mise-en-scene to parallel lives across generations and time, but much looser and less linear, BALLAD never attempts to portray Caribbean writer Suzanne Césaire but the absence of her in the history of art and poetry. How do you grasp something so elusive? Suzanne Césaire was born in Martinique and met her husband Aimé when she studied in Paris, where she also met André Breton. Césaire was a writer, a teacher, an activist. Together with her husband, she co-founded a literary magazine where she played an important editorial role but only ever published seven essays, between 1941 and 1945. She destroyed her writings after 1945. "And we are making a film about a woman who wants to be forgotten," says Zita Hanrot, who acts in the film not as Suzanne Césaire but as an actress who tries to understand Césaire. Reality has casted a spell on the realm of fiction. Hanrot, a new mother, nurtures her baby and pushes away a stroller before we hear Césaire say, through Hanrot’s lips, "Proust wrote in his parents’ luxurious house. Very sincerely, make Proust a farm worker from Martinique, I doubt he would have written In Search of Lost Time." Suzanne and Aimé had six children. I cannot imagine how she would have the time to teach and edit, let alone to write. The sound of baby crying often decorates the soundscape of the film. Fragmented stories, through Césaire’s writing with a tad of commentary, are frequently conveyed beyond the picture frame, through sound, songs and dialogs over a crystalized still photograph or a fixed-camera shot of a quiet tropical forest, devoid of human presence as if no one ever existed. It makes sense that footage from this film is shown as an installation in this year’s Whitney Biennial. In many ways, it is an art film that—with the cast’s fraught acting, its fragmentation, and its allusion to theater and performance—would give a stunning wash to a gallery room but somehow fall flat on a big screen. But you’ve got over an hour of lush 16mm colors and eventful sounds, sit back and lose yourself in this tropical reverie. (2024, 75 min, DCP Digital) [Nicky Ni]
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Experimental Shorts: The Act of Seeing
Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 8pm
The films in CIFF’s experimental shorts program aren’t exactly avant-garde, but they do present a variety of ideas and stories palatable to the everyday festival attendee. Marisa Hoicka’s TEEN GIRL FANTASY (2024, 10 min) features a montage of archival footage—of forests and beaches, classrooms and courtrooms—that forces the audience to reckon with our understanding of the past. It’s easy to view this film as a romanticization of a bygone era, but as we hear voiceovers from various girls, these idyllic images become ruptured. Their stories allude to sexual abuse from an older man and the way he is absolved of his evils—not just from patriarchal systems, but through the incomplete histories telegraphed by old, pleasant documentaries. The drumline percussion proves a potent accompaniment to the girls’ diaristic storytelling. We all fall in line to a certain version of history, but whose? Chi-Jang Yin’s I WAS THERE, PART II (2024, 10 min) is similarly interested in considering the past. It shows newly unearthed archival footage of Hiroshima’s destruction and intersperses them with contemporary images. Its use of onscreen text is most essential to its goal. In the second half of the film, it appears without any voiceover. This text acts as a chance for the director to explain a dream she had, ruminating about life and death in the process—the words weigh heavier without actual speech. As the archival footage continues to play, there is an increasing understanding of how the city’s bombing has lingering effects in the present day—not just materially, but in the subconscious. María Salafranca's BLACK SHADOW (2024, 7 min) is a brief lyrical portrait of a grieving woman. She hacks away with a machete, appearing as a small fraction of a landscape. This quickly leads to a series of intimate images that fade in and out, are dimly lit, and often take place in domestic spaces. Before long, she’s back in the daylight and working. This is the way sadness can feel: moments of nothingness, and then the painful need to keep on living. It’s the most subtly affecting work in the program. Valentin Noujaïm’s TO EXIST UNDER PERMANENT SUSPICION (2024, 14 min) is another exercise in tension and release. Skyscrapers and corporate spaces become a site of cold isolation, and the different textures (via security footage and digital renderings of the space) and aesthetic decisions (spare sound design and canted angles) cast a palpable sense of unease as we follow a Black office worker. In the film’s closing scenes, she dances along to a song by UK duo Space Afrika, and then the building burns—her sudden comfort, and the surprising warmth of the atmosphere, is enormous. Alison McAlpine’s PERFECTLY A STRANGENESS (2024, 15 min) is largely just a series of sumptuous images. Donkeys traverse varied terrain and find their way to Chile’s La Silla Observatory. The slowness of their movement, and the quietude of these scenes, serves as necessary priming for what follows: minimalist percussion and phasing techniques soundtracking images of the infrastructure, their machinery, and the stars. It’s all a bit garish. Still, when the sound of donkeys walking away closes out the film, it’s a reminder of how much there is to marvel in the everyday just above us, and that it sometimes takes traveling far from our cities to get the best view. There’s a prevailing message: maybe the things we construct should magnify, not obscure, the beauty of the natural world. Kevin Jerome Everson’s HAZEL (DUAL) (2023, 12 min) is a dual-screen recreation of Eddie Hazel’s guitar solo from Funkadelic’s 1971 classic “Maggot Brain.” Beyond the gloriousness of the music itself, the two screens—the left showing the performer’s body in full, the right showing a close-up of their face—reveals the way that playing music can feel like conjuring up something magical. More than any other film I’ve seen, HAZEL (DUAL) captures the simultaneously plain and extraordinary nature of playing an instrument. The close-ups of the person’s face are striking, gorgeous, and otherworldly—the music could be described the same way. When you wield a camera or a guitar, you can tap into something ineffable. Also screening is Isadora Neves Marques’ MY SENSES ARE ALL I HAVE TO OFFER (2024, 20 min). [Joshua Minsoo Kim]
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Kiyoshi Kurosawa CLOUD (Japan)
AMC Newcity 14 – Thursday, 10pm
Genre master Kiyoshi Kurosawa (PULSE, CURE) revisits familiar territory with a modern twist in his latest film; CLOUD is an anti-capitalist techno-horror which criticizes the rising gig economy with a combination of dark humor and violence. Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda) is trying to make some quick money reselling items online at markup. Some success leads him to quit his factory job and he, his girlfriend, Akiko (Kotone Furukawa), and a loyal assistant, Sano (Daiken Okudaira), relocate to a remote mountain home to continue business. But his new life is being interrupted by strange visitors; many of Yoshii’s items were fakes or faulty, and his buyers are not happy. His handle, "Ratel," is being called out on online message boards as untrustworthy and a ragtag gang of disgruntled customers are rallying to enact vengeance for being duped in person. The seemingly impersonal internet transaction is suddenly taken very personally. It’s a slow build with a few uncanny moments to start, but CLOUD becomes more intriguing as its themes come into focus. It is a film about the gamification of internet-based commerce, and how that plays out in the real world, like the vengeful clients justifying their violent actions. Repeating shots of Yoshii staring blankly at his computer screen as he waits for his posted items to sell are the most unnerving and effective moments; he appears hypnotized, suggesting both the allure and emptiness of his endeavors. While Kurosawa’s cinematography is steely blue and gray reflecting the coldness of the internet, Yoshii’s stare implies the online space is also always being internalized by the user, with real-world consequences. (2024, 123 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING
Jacques Rivette’s L’AMOUR FOU (France)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Saturday and Sunday, 3pm
Jacques Rivette’s first experiment with extended duration, the four-hour L’AMOUR FOU prefigures some of the major achievements of ‘70s European cinema, namely Jean Eustache’s THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE (1973), Chantal Akerman’s JEANNE DIELMAN (1975), and Rivette’s own OUT 1 (1971). It also marks the first time that Rivette effectively turned the cinematic epic inside out. Set over a couple of weeks and focusing on just a handful of characters, L’AMOUR FOU nonetheless feels monumental; Rivette patiently accumulates details until the story seems all-encompassing, regarding the characters (and the actors who play them) with such intensity that you come to consider them from any number of perspectives. The film interweaves two main storylines: the first concerns the rehearsals for a new stage adaptation of Racine’s 17th-century play Andromaque, which are also being filmed by a TV documentary crew (in a very Nouvelle Vague joke, the director of the documentary is played by André S. Labarthe, co-creator of the long-running French TV series Cinéastes de notre temps); the second concerns the dissolution of the marriage between the play’s director and star, played by Jean-Pierre Kalfon and Bulle Ogier, respectively. The premise gives rise to all sorts of Rivettean tensions between theater and cinema, antiquity and modernity, performance and reality, and men and women—and, in Rivettean fashion, few (if any) of these tensions get resolved by the film’s end. The most cryptic of the French New Wave directors (trumping even Godard), Rivette subscribed to a very particular brand of cinephilia by which movies got turned into environments to explore. According to legend, he loved Renoir’s THE GOLDEN COACH (1952) so much that he watched it several times in a row on opening day. With L’AMOUR FOU, he started making movies that conveyed this marathon experience to his viewing audience. It’s a bold film in more ways than one—it may be the notoriously shy Rivette’s most autobiographical work. A clue to its personal nature is that it was cowritten by Marilù Parolini, to whom Rivette was briefly married in the early 1960s; their marriage ended around the time Rivette staged a theatrical adaptation of Diderot’s 17th-century novel The Nun (a work he’d later turn into a film). I won’t speculate as to whether Rivette and Parolini’s marriage disintegrated like the one in the film—or whether they briefly rallied their love for each other before calling it quits, as Kalfon and Ogier do in the magisterial (and strangely frightening) final hour—suffice it to say that the breakdown of trust in the onscreen relationship is presented so rawly that it feels like the stuff of lived experience. Screening as part of the New Releases and Restorations series. (1969, 246 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
F.W. Murnau's FAUST (Germany/Silent)
Chicago Film Society at Music Box Theatre – Sunday, 8pm
Humanity’s struggle to reconcile the good and evil in our nature has long been a source of religious and philosophical debate. A test of religious faith is the starting point for the tale of Faust, a man who gains vast earthly knowledge and pleasures by selling his soul to the devil. This much-adapted story attracted one of the great masters of the silent film era, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, who used the play written by Johann Goethe as the basis for his final German film before emigrating to the United States. A production of Germany’s famed UFA film studio, FAUST was a lavish box-office bomb that only gained its reputation as a masterpiece of German Expressionist filmmaking in subsequent decades. Its opening sequences show the reputation is well-earned, with depictions of the otherworldly forces shaping human existence. The four horsemen of the apocalypse, ragged on their skeleton-horses ride through the air, heralding a doughy-faced devil festooned with enormous, black wings who confronts the glowing-white figure of Archangel Michael (Werner Fuetterer) and wagers for control of the universe that he can turn the elderly scholar Faust (Gösta Ekman) away from God. The scene of the devil nearly enveloping Faust’s town with his wings and releasing the Plague is justly famous and as frightening today as it must have been in 1926. The townspeople turn to Faust to find a cure, but when he fails to do so through science and prayer, he becomes vulnerable to Mephisto (the great Emil Jannings), the devil’s emissary, who offers him a trial day and secures his signature in blood. Faust effects a miracle cure, but when his pact with the devil becomes known as he shrinks from a crucifix, the townspeople shun him. It is then that Mephisto is able to make their arrangement permanent, as Faust chooses youth and the pleasures of the flesh. Faust’s ultimate redemption through the love of Gretchen (Camilla Horn), an innocent, young woman he seduces, is rather drawn out and pedestrian, but it is a delight to see Jannings ham it up as Mephisto, wreaking havoc as a proper trickster must do in “service” to his master. I was unpleasantly surprised to catch more than a whiff of the underlying sentiments of Nazism when the script equates the Black Death with the plague that struck down the first-born of Egypt in the name of Jewish freedom, as well as the völkisch feeling Faust longs for as he commands Mephisto to take him “home.” The long-bearded, elderly Faust, surrounded by his books and potions, presents as Jewish as well. The image of him burning books, with his singed Christian bible turning into a book of the dark arts reminiscent of the kabbala, sealed the deal for me. Nonetheless, the special effects are first-rate, the images highly memorable, and the performances generally effective. Screening as part of Music Box of Horrors: The Dream Child, with live musical accompaniment by Maxx McGathey. (1926, 106 min, 35mm) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Mikhail Kalatozov's I AM CUBA (Cuba/USSR)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 6pm
The career of Georgian filmmaker Mikhail Kalatozov is a virtual index of the changing prerogatives of the Soviet film industry. Following the formalist gambits of SALT FOR SVENETIA (1930) and NAIL IN THE BOOT (1931), Kalatozov was excommunicated from revolutionary filmmaking and eventually appointed Moscow's ambassador to Hollywood. With the post-Stalin thaw, Kalatozov was suddenly in vogue again. His 1957 film THE CRANES ARE FLYING was a festival phenomenon and even earned US distribution from Warner Bros. For Pauline Kael, Kalatozov represented a deceptively non-ideological strain of Communism kitsch, calculated to make Westerners swoon with drippy romantic sentiment. Kael didn't have much to fear. Kalatozov would soon begin work on I AM CUBA, a belligerent third-world epic practically engineered to alienate liberal sympathizers. Indeed, I AM CUBA never played in the States until a 1992 engagement at the Telluride Film Festival; shortly thereafter, it was picked up by Milestone and asserted itself as, in J. Hoberman's phrase, the "Siberian mammoth" of Cold War cinema. The formal brilliance of I AM CUBA is now well known and copied recklessly by capitalists everywhere (P.T. Anderson most unabashedly). The staggering, swaggering camera choreography and unapologetic reliance on white-hot infrared film stock acknowledged, we should also consider I AM CUBA as a daffy but ultimately sincere political document. Kalatozov and his cameraman Serguey Urusevsky were adolescents in 1917 and experienced the corrosion of the Revolution first hand. The poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko, who co-wrote the screenplay with Cuban Enrique Pineda Barnet, was born in 1933 and knew the Revolution only in its debased Stalinist form. To these artists, Castro's Cuba was a legitimate laboratory and a beacon of promise. One version of the film, with Spanish dialogue and a Russian overdub that translates each line, literalizes the superimposition of one political experience upon another. One regime salutes another and incubates a full-blown pulp creation myth. Screening as part of the Propaganda and Counterculture lecture series. (1964, 141 min, DCP Digital Projection) [K.A. Westphal]
Robert Bresson's THE DEVIL, PROBABLY (France)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Thursday, 7pm
One of the only original screenplays written by Robert Bresson (all but two of his films being adapted from other works), THE DEVIL, PROBABLY is described by the director himself as his “most ghastly.” Told through the use of flashback from news reports, the film reconstructs the life of its young, intelligent protagonist Charles (Antoine Monnier), who has committed suicide. Charles serves as an analogy for the disenfranchised youth of France in the late 1960’s that staged protests at universities and factories. Weary of the opulence of everyday life, Charles is left wondering what the point of it all is—even with education, drugs, philosophy, and other things to consider, what is the point of this existence? Many of these musings are pondered aloud to friends or loved ones and one such sequence aboard a bus discussing politics resonates strongly today given the current political landscape in both France and the United States. Bresson's penchant for minimalism pairs perfectly with the existential dread inherent in the film’s plot. Some of the commonplace actives of daily life are shot so matter-of-factly, with little to no camera movement, that it almost feels documentarian in nature. This added facet not only allows the audience to empathize with Charles’s exacerbations but also invites them to ponder their own lives in the grand scheme of things. Rainer Werner Fassbinder says of THE DEVIL, PROBABLY, “The questions Bresson asks will never be unimportant” and now 40 years later, it's plain to see that this film maintains the integrity its auteur set out for so long ago. Screening as part of the Capturing the Real: Four by Robert Bresson series. (1977, 96 min, 35mm) [Kyle Cubr]
Marleen Gorris’ A QUESTION OF SILENCE (The Netherlands)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Tuesday, 7pm
During the 1970s and ’80s, feminism was a ripe subject for cinematic storytelling. One unabashedly feminist film from the time that has stuck with me over the years is the Dutch film A QUESTION OF SILENCE. This film by feminist, queer activist and director Marleen Gorris puts a very civilized veneer over a tale of female revenge in which the murder at its center is never explicitly shown. We meet three women—housewife and mother Christine (Edda Barends), divorced waitress An (Henriette Tol), and unmarried secretary Andrea (Nelly Firjda)—as each goes about her daily routine. One by one, policemen come and take them away. They are being charged with the heinous murder and mutilation of the manager of a women’s clothing boutique, which unfolds episodically throughout the film. None of the women knew each other or the manager. Psychiatrist Janine van den Bos (Cox Habbema) is engaged to determine if they are mentally fit to stand trial. Through her interviews, Janine learns that each woman has been demeaned by the men in her life. Janine comes to understand the women—even Christine, who can speak, but, like Bartleby in a story by Herman Melville, prefers not to—and pronounces them sane. When the prosecutor expresses doubt about this assessment, the defendants, Janine, and some women in the courtroom who passively observed the murder burst into uncontrollable laughter, at which point the defendants are removed while the trial proceeds without them. The period in which this film was released marked perhaps the lowest point in male/female interpersonal relations in developed societies of the 20th century. Legislative gains made by first-wave feminists were being followed up by challenges to the social and psychological order, prompting a backlash. A QUESTION OF SILENCE takes pains to provide a context and justification of sorts for the women’s actions. Under the aegis of the Dutch legal system, Janine comes to see how male prerogatives have denied these women opportunities for financial security, professional advancement, and equality in marriage. She discovers that her own rage matches theirs, and her good marriage to a doctor fractures as the case exposes his self-centered, male entitlements. Time and again, Gorris emphasizes the second-class status of women in Dutch society and the blindness to this injustice that attends it. In one scene, Andrea, who routinely does all the work and research for her boss, gives a reasoned rundown of their company’s unfavorable position in the North African market. A couple of beats later, a man sitting to her right repeats exactly what she said; Andrea’s boss compliments the man on his ideas. The scene would be funny to me if I hadn’t actually witnessed similar scenes over the years. The courtroom scenes exaggerate the buffoonery of the law and its representatives. Nonetheless, these women have contributed to the complicity of silence by tacitly giving up on trying to educate their society. All they got was a temporarily satisfying revenge. The hint of a revolution to come, however, adds a measure of hope to this first shot in the dark. Preceded by Robin Laurie and Margot Nash’s 1976 experimental short film WE AIM TO PLEASE. Screening as part of Films by Women/Chicago '74. (1982, 92 min, 35mm) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Robert Bresson's LANCELOT DU LAC (France)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Saturday, 7:30pm
The best way to describe Bresson's intense, stilted adaptation of the concluding book of Le Mort le Roi Artu is essentially as an unfunny version of MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL. For the first two minutes of LANCELOT DU LAC—especially if you've been attending the rest of the Siskel's Bresson retrospective—are truly alarming: unnamed Knights of the Round Table, in awkward forest battle, decapitate and bludgeon each other, resulting in fountains of stage blood. Returning to a humble, tented Camelot, the knights shuffle around with loudly clanking armor, and other sound effects (such as a whinnying horse) are repeated until they become obviously artificial to the viewer. What was for Bresson intended as sources of poetic estrangement became in the hands of Terry Gilliam groundbreaking middlebrow ensemble comedy. The plot, if you're unfamiliar with late Arthurian legend, is not exactly well-telegraphed: Bresson is even more concerned than usual with a relentless experimentation in framing and editing which prefers movement, sound, and details of objects to any particularly coherent narrative exposition. (This becomes highlighted in a central jousting sequence that tries as hard as possible to break all the rules of sports television.) It is ultimately a film suffused in temporal paradox: while Bresson's typically catatonic dialogue and repetitious cadences might seem a postmodern invention, in LANCELOT DU LAC they tend to sound closer to the original medieval rhetoric than anything else. Screening as part of the Capturing the Real: Four by Robert Bresson series. (1974, 85 min, 35mm) [Michael Castelle]
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Sally Potter's ORLANDO (UK)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Thursday, 9:30pm
Sally Potter's ORLANDO is not so much an adaptation of Virginia Woolf's novel as it is an interpretation respective to the nuances of its medium. "It would have been a disservice to Woolf to remain slavish to the letter of the book," Potter wrote. "For just as she was always a writer who engaged with writing and the form of the novel, similarly the film needed to engage with the energy of cinema." And it does, with such finesse that at times it's rather slow and mundane, just as life is often slow and mundane. Roger Ebert so eloquently wrote in his review of the film that "it is not about a story or a plot, but about a vision of human existence. What does it mean to be born as a woman, or a man? To be born at one time instead of another?" Potter doesn't attempt to answer these questions but instead relishes in their very existence. In addition to such existential ruminations, themes of gender, art, and conformity are also confronted, just as in the book. Titled Orlando: A Biography, Woolf's novel was meant to be something of a spoof inspired by her lovers' turbulent family history. (The lover in question was fellow writer Vita Sackville-West.) Both are about a young Elizabethan nobleman who mysteriously turns into a woman. In the book it's never explained, but in the film, eternal youth is granted to the teenaged Orlando by Elizabeth I, who's played to perfection by gay icon Quentin Crisp. It's fitting, then, for this and other obvious reasons, that Tilda Swinton was first able to explore her own conspicuous androgyny in the title role. For those all too familiar with her now archetypal aesthetic, ORLANDO will breathe new life into one's appreciation of her as both an actress and an icon. Potter's talents are no less extraordinary; a penchant for transformation is evident in most of her films, though it's realized more explicitly in this one. Director Jane Campion best spoke to its metamorphic capabilities: "When my son died, on the third day, I was devastated, I didn't know what to do with myself. I went to see ORLANDO. It was so beautiful. This earth can be transformed. There are moments of extreme wonder... and that's all worth living for." Screening as part of the Subversive Histories: A Snapshot of Queer Cinema series. (1993, 93 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]
Jean Rollin’s THE GRAPES OF DEATH (France)
Oscarbate Film Collective at Davis Theater – Wednesday, 9:15pm
Plenty of movies get compared to nightmares, but the films of Jean Rollin really have the unaccountable matter-of-factness I associate with bad dreams. Plot summaries don’t do justice to his work, with its fevered imagery, languorous pacing, clunky transitions, and prosaic eroticism. They’re experiences as much as they are stories. While they trade in horror imagery and premises, they’re rarely scary; rather, Rollin uses horror elements to realize personal fantasies/obsessions about sex, death, and social decay. Dave Kehr once described Rollin as a cinematic outsider artist, and you can see what he means. His films operate according to an insistent private logic that, when combined with crude production values, takes on a certain folkloric quality. And so it goes with Rollin’s storytelling—everything that happens in his films feels like it was somehow fated to happen, as it does in folk tales. In THE GRAPES OF DEATH, a sort-of Gallic variation on George Romero’s THE CRAZIES (1973), there’s no explanation until the near the end as to why most of the locals in a northern French community have turned into homicidal maniacs with leprous rashes, but that’s just as well. For most of the movie, one gets the impression that the maniacs have simply emerged from the craggy, coastal northern landscapes (which are as central to Rollin’s cinema as stage blood and nudity), like some Old Testament plague. The lack of exposition provides for some great shocks early on, when the film’s heroine, Élisabeth (Marie-Georges Pascal), first encounters one of the killer horde on a train without warning (Rollin plays on the already claustrophobic compartments to heighten the nightmarish quality of this sequence). When the situation on the train becomes untenable, Élisabeth jumps off, only to find herself in the heart of the region affected by the plague. What follows is frequently gruesome but also strangely endearing; Rollin’s plotting feels childlike in how the nature of the plague seems to change from scene to scene. (For instance, why does the one woman become a homicidal maniac without developing rashes or losing her sense of reason?) You can almost imagine the movie being written exquisite corpse-style, and indeed, THE GRAPES OF DEATH is most commanding when it seems to have come straight from Rollin’s subconscious. (1978, 91 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Melvin Van Peebles’ WATERMELON MAN (US)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Monday, 7pm
The 1970s, the decade in which the American independent film movement and the careers of many of today’s iconic filmmakers had their starts, got a rip-roaring launch when the great Melvin Van Peebles made his only studio feature, WATERMELON MAN, a comedy about a bigoted white man who turns Black overnight. The clueless greenlighters at Columbia Pictures did not conceive of WATERMELON MAN as a thoughtful film about race relations, but rather one designed to comfort white pseudo-liberal audiences. The racism is so cartoonish they would be able to say “that’s them, not me” with relative ease, and the proposed ending that has the protagonist wake up from the nightmare of being Black is the “you understood” of white society. Van Peebles would have none of it. Not willing to promote the idea that being Black is a nightmare, he convinced the studio to let him hire Godfrey Cambridge instead of Jack Lemmon as casually bigoted insurance salesman Jeff Gerber and put him in whiteface for the beginning sequences. He agreed to include the dream ending and then “forgot” to shoot it. The result is a film that keelhauls white America. Jeff’s wife Althea (Estelle Parsons) rails against Jeff’s racism at the start of the film, but starts singing a different tune when she actually has to live her "principles." Jeff’s neighbors harass and stop him for stealing when he has his customary morning race to catch his bus, a commentary on running while Black. Van Peebles also takes on the medical community, as Jeff’s doctor (Kay E. Kuter), failing to diagnose the cause of his melanin change, searches for a genetic answer, pointing to his full name of Jefferson and his wife’s name as evidence that Jeff always had Black tendencies that were bound to erupt. Godfrey Cambridge provides a flawed, but still impressive backbone to this film. His hysteria after his color change is mordant, but mainly the stuff of sitcoms. Once he settles into his Black identity, however, Cambridge brings more nuance and depth to his role. He understands the way things are and even seems to make Van Peebles’s awkwardly symbolic framing of Jeff behind burglar bars in his new apartment seem more matter-of-factly part of the Black experience than that of a white man trapped in a Black body. Van Peebles offers many of his signature flourishes, including sex in the form of a Black go-go dancer in pasties and incidental music with occasional lyrics that emphasize the Black dilemma in America. “This ain’t America, is it?” is more than Jeff’s bewilderment at his loss of entitlements; it is a populist cry from America’s disenfranchised. Despite its obviousness, the script for WATERMELON MAN is well paced and witty enough for Van Peebles to sink his teeth into. He may have been paired with this movie simply because of its subject, but Van Peebles used the opportunity to its utmost. WATERMELON MAN is much better than it should have been and formed a valuable proving ground for one of our most important Black filmmakers. Screening as part of the Columbia Pictures in the 1970s series. (1970, 100 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Todd Haynes' SAFE (US)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm and Saturday, 9:30pm
Director Todd Haynes has restless eyes and ears that never linger in one aesthetic or time-period for longer than a film. And despite his continual shifts, it's the aesthetic that tends to star in his films, but this is never a shallow engagement. If Haynes can be said to have a formula, it is to find a pristine surface and scratch until we can see the uneasy construction underneath. His first (banned) public experiment was SUPERSTAR: THE KAREN CARPENTER STORY, in which he used Barbie doll whittling as an inspired, literal representation of Karen Carpenter's struggle with her eating disorder. FAR FROM HEAVEN honored and interrogated the world of Douglas Sirk. In I'M NOT THERE, he chipped away at the impenetrable image of Bob Dylan, all the while pointing at the impossibility of his project with a graphic mix of sympathy and irony. SAFE takes a break from public images to get intimate with a housewife's health. Shot and lit with the peachy haloes of a douche commercial, SAFE's blurry suburban Los Angeles is an unlikely venue for horror. We follow Carol White on her errands, to her exercise classes, with her friendly acquaintances; no one seems to mean her any harm. But it's precisely this vagueness—of purpose, of symptoms, of identity—that begins to gnaw at Carol until she is reduced to her flintiest self-preservation impulse. She suffers from both the controversial Multiple Chemical Sensitivity and the middle-class affliction of Unlimited Healing Budget, and either condition could prove fatal. Haynes takes care not to fix any problems or to answer stupid questions; the ending lingers in one's mind like an unresolved chord. Screening as part of the Women's Paranoia: Cassandras and Conspiracies series. (1995, 119 min, 35mm) [Josephine Ferorelli]
Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, & Galen Johnson's RUMOURS (Canada/Germany)
Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes
RUMOURS, the latest nocturnal emission from Guy Maddin, is a daring and altogether shocking aesthetic deviation for the Canadian auteur who, for the better part of three decades, has staked his name on an outré brand of silent film panache and has remained one of cinema's most immediately recognizable stylists. With his newest, an apocalyptic political satire co-directed by brothers Evan and Galen Johnson, he has dispensed with the vast majority of his usual tricks, swapping out the dynamic shadow play of German Expressionism and the blistering rhythms of the Soviet montage for a filmic approach that is decidedly more contemporary and festival friendly. If that sounds like a slight against the film, I assure you it is not; this is a venomous exercise in détournement that leverages its heightened visual fidelity, star-studded cast and sweeping orchestral score as ironic signifiers of the status quo in a scathing satire of feckless liberalism. The film turns its gaze towards a fictionalized staging of the annual G7 summit, examining seven world leaders representing powerful Western democracies as they clumsily attempt to draft a provisional statement in response to a major global crisis—one that is never actually explained throughout the film’s runtime. There’s a real prom night feel to the proceedings as the heads of state decamp to a sunny gazebo on the outskirts of a German chalet, where they flirt like schoolchildren and spend more time drinking Bordeaux than generating salient ideas for their statement. The film begins in earnest when night falls as cell phones lose signal, butlers and chauffeurs vanish into thin air, and the hapless politicos are ultimately forced to embark on a grim journey through the woods in hopes of finding rescue, beset along the way by a cavalcade of grotesqueries: a giant brain (a "game-changer" according to Alicia Vikander in a scene-stealing turn as a deranged EU emissary) and a horde of masturbating bog zombies (routinely decried as protestors and terrorists) chief among them. In spite of the film’s visual concessions, fans of Maddin’s extensive body of work will find plenty to love in the film’s slow and shambolic march towards Armageddon, one which achieves a sustained pitch of droll absurdism and psychosexual perversion that should be unmistakable to acolytes of the director. The film is doggedly committed to broad, slapstick caricatures of the politicians and hellbent on sidestepping topicality via increasingly surrealist flourishes, but its abiding ideology is crystal clear. Firstly, the politician can only cower in terror when removed from social context and forced to grapple with their position in the hierarchies of the natural world. Secondly, global agents of neoliberalism will see the end of the world itself approaching in the rearview and continue driving as though nothing is happening. They will conduct geopolitical business as usual, wax poetic about the hallowed legacy of Western democracy, and glibly gesture towards corrective action through statements that, as the film’s ending seems to argue, might as well be written by ChatGPT. (2024, 104 min, DCP Digital) [David Whitehouse]
Molly Hewitt's HOLY TRINITY (US)
Alamo Drafthouse – Wednesday, 9:30pm
A movie about gaining the ability to speak to the dead after huffing Yoruba Orisha cleansing spray from a paper bag. Are you in or are you out? What if there also were casual hi-glam and drag elements? What if the film was the spiritual coming-of-age story of a queer femme dominatrix? What if someone made a film that somehow landed dead center in the Venn diagram intersection of John Waters’ and Bruce LaBruce’s films, the Ramones’ song lyrics, and Cindy Sherman’s and David LaChappelle’s photography? So… are you in or are you out? HOLY TRINITY is a film made exactly for the type of people who are going to love HOLY TRINITY. Director, and star, Molly Hewitt has created a world that is casually, yet still somehow aggressively, queer—nothing is particularly queer in the film’s world because everything is queer. It’s an amazing accomplishment. The casually absurd is just casual, the fringe is front and center. Yet, for a movie centered on huffing, Hewitt has made a lovely story about the spiritual dynamics of power and how it affects the film’s protagonist, Trinity. After looking for a quick high and huffing her roommate’s spiritual room cleansing spray (think a can of Lysol, but from the corner botanica) she discovers she can communicate with the dead. This new talent becomes both a gift (she now has an edge on her submissive clients) and a curse (she becomes internet famous to the detriment of her personal love life). With her new gift, Trinity has to learn to re-calibrate the power dynamics of her life, and the world around her. The entire movie is filled with these ideas. She has to re-question consent with her clients and the capitalist structure that surrounds that, her lifelong relationship with Catholicism, the personal relationship with her partner, Baby. It’s almost as if huffing just may have unintended consequences—ones both hilarious and serious. You’d think the story would get convoluted with all the concerted ridiculousness, but it doesn't. You can feel the sex-positivity, body-positivity, queer-positivity, radiating from this movie. HOLY TRINITY is absolutely shameless in the best way possible—in a literal way. No one feels any shame for what they do, or how they act, because there’s no need to—that’s just the way life is. Queer folks just living their outrageous lives, on their own fantastic terms. So… are you in, or are you out? Screening as part of Weird Wednesday with Hewitt in person for a post-screening Q&A. (2019, 91 min, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
Chuck Russell’s A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3: DREAM WARRIORS (US)
Alamo Drafthouse – Monday, 10pm
While horror enthusiasts eagerly flock to Damien Leone’s TERRIFIER films featuring Art the Clown, this fascination with gory, inventive, and humorous killings can be traced back to Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund). Art’s pantomime behavior may be more akin to Harpo Marx, but both Krueger and Art share a love of artistic murder. Freddy wasn’t always the wisecracking humorist audiences know him as today. He was a scary force that attacked teens when they were most vulnerable—in bed, asleep. A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984) builds itself on surrealist gags: Freddy’s tongue coming out of the phone, stairs transforming into marshmallow fluff, and Johnny Depp sinking into his bed and exploding into a geyser of blood. Each practical effects gag provided an unnerving sight for audiences. Freddy was scary. New Line Cinema, who distributed the first film, decided to dive headfirst into a sequel and the quick result didn’t excite audiences. It would be a few decades before FREDDY’S REVENGE (1985) would find its cult audience in the LGBTQ+ community. In the meantime, Freddy Krueger became a household name. In two films he had clawed himself into the ranks of slasher stardom, but it was his third film that made him a cultural phenomenon. New Line wanted to give NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET another shot, believing the IP could produce profits, and the result was DREAM WARRIORS. A perfect sequel to the first film, complete with a returning Heather Langenkamp as Nancy and John Saxon as Nancy’s dad. When NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3: DREAM WARRIORS begins, it has been six years since the first film and Nancy is returning to Springwood to assist at Westin Hills Psychiatric Hospital. She’s a therapist who specializes in dream disorders and the troubled teens there have been having terrible nightmares as of late. The teenagers here are different from the normal stock of '80s slasher fodder; these teens each bare emotional scars from past trauma and are far from helpless victims. Nancy learns that Freddy’s back and targeting one of the teens specifically, Kristen—screen debut for Patricia Arquette—who can pull people into her dreams. This opened the film’s world to increasingly fantastic realms of horror and humor. The enduring impact of DREAM WARRIORS is attributable to the collaboration of a talented ensemble of creators. Wes Craven contributed to the screenplay, ensuring narrative continuity by reintroducing Nancy. He later revived her character in the meta-slasher NEW NIGHTMARE (1994), completing an unofficial trilogy. The film also showcased Chicago artists Frank Darabont and Chuck Russell, who first met on the set of HELL NIGHT (1981). Before they partnered on the remake of THE BLOB, they were presented with the opportunity to craft a Freddy Krueger sequel. Their film would establish a formula that future installments would strive to emulate—a blend of supernatural horror, imaginative world-building, brutal killings, dark humor, and a head-banging soundtrack by Dokken. The team behind DREAM WARRIORS mirrors the eclectic group of teenagers depicted in the filmm as the emphasis on teamwork and resilience in the face of obstruction is a core theme within the film. Nancy empowers the teens to harness their unique abilities within their dreams, including a mohawk-wearing punk armed with switchblades, a mute pervert wielding a reality-bending voice, a wheelchair-bound wizard channeling the magic of Dungeons & Dragons, and a chair bending strongman. This motley crew of warriors have to go head-to-head with the "Bastard son of a hundred maniacs." The amalgamation of fantastical sets, special effects, character depth, and macabre comedy produced a perfect storm for New Line Cinema. DREAM WARRIORS is still considered the most popular film of the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET series. Freddy’s famous pre-kill quip, “Welcome to prime time, bitch!” became more than a one-liner; it was a herald. Freddy was no longer just a monster—he was a brand, a cultural icon who had slashed his way into a generation’s nightmares and merchandising shelves alike. (1987, 96 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]
Bruce Pittman’s HELLO MARY LOU: PROM NIGHT II (Canada)
Music Box Theatre – Friday, 9:45pm
I was first introduced to HELLO MARY LOU: PROM NIGHT II last year when it was featured on an episode of the “bad” movie podcast How Did This Get Made? The hosts, along with guests Charlize Theron and Seth Rogen, concluded the film is worth a watch, and I wholeheartedly agree. HELLO MARY LOU: PROM NIGHT II is an absurd horror with wildly fun performances and genuinely unsettling special effects. Despite the subtitle, the film has nothing to do with the 1980 original PROM NIGHT (which starred formative scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis) other than a high school setting. In 1957, right after being crowned prom queen, Mary Lou Maloney (Lisa Schrage) is murdered in a prank gone terribly wrong. Thirty years later, shy high schooler Vicki (Wendy Lyon) goes searching for a cheap prom dress option in the props department of the school theater and finds herself possessed by Mary Lou’s uninhibited spirit. The film also stars Michael Ironside as Mary Lou’s former beau turned high school principal, who also happens to be the father of Vicki’s steady boyfriend (Justin Louis)—needless to say, things get complicated. HELLO MARY LOU: PROM NIGHT II draws on familiar tropes of late 70s and 80s teen horrors but smashing them together results in an entertaining supernatural slasher; it helps, too, that the film doesn’t take itself too seriously. There are disturbing kills and impressive effects, with especially unnerving scenes involving a possessed rocking horse and a haunted chalkboard. There are also surprisingly sincere moments, particularly early scenes between Vicki and her friend Jess. With writer Ron Oliver in person for a post-screening Q&A. Screening as part of Music Box of Horrors: The Dream Child. (1987, 97 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]
Clive Barker's HELLRAISER (UK)
Leather Archives & Museum – Saturday, 7pm
“Jesus wept,” utters Frank Cotton as hooks and chains manifest from a hellish dimension and tear his body to scraps of flesh and fiber. With HELLRAISER, Clive Barker made his feature film directing debut, and he certainly did not hold himself back. Barker, adapting his 1986 novella The Hellbound Heart, knew exactly what he wanted to do here—and that's an extremely undervalued quality. This is a fabulously disgusting, funny, and erotic film. HELLRAISER presents what happens after Frank comes into possession of a mysterious puzzle box that summons the grotesque Cenobites, who describe themselves as “Explorers in the further regions of experience. Demons to some. Angels to others.” The Cenobites are demonic-looking beings whose flesh is mutilated in horrific ways. The most recognizable one is Pinhead—a giant, ghostly white being with nails protruding from all over his head. Pinhead has transcended the HELLRAISER films, being featured in popular video games among the likes of the other horror icons like Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers, while the HELLRAISER IP has stagnated and declined. The good news is that HELLRAISER will be receiving a reboot with Barker closely involved, something that hasn’t happened since he received a “Story By” credit on HELLBOUND: HELLRAISER II (1988). While the disdain towards remakes and reboots is understandable, let's hope the makers of the new one can take some cues from the originator of the series and produce something equally fun and filthy. HELLRAISER is full of amazingly gory practical effects that will leave horror aficionados pondering the techniques that make everything look so slimy. The film also contains a healthy blend of corny dialogue and sexual tension that round this out as a horror classic. (1987, 93 minutes, Digital Projection) [Drew Van Weelden]
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Screening with Tony Randel's 1988 sequel HELLBOUND: HELLRAISER II (97 min, Digital Projection) at 9:15pm as part of the Fetish Film Forum, co-presented by Brian Kirst of Big Gay Horror Fan.
David Cronenberg's THE BROOD (Canada)
Alamo Drafthouse – Monday, 7pm
THE BROOD might be described as a transitional work for David Cronenberg. On the one hand, it was one of his first films to feature well-known actors and glossy production values; on the other, it arrived before the breakthroughs of SCANNERS and VIDEODROME, which expanded Cronenberg’s worldview to consider global conspiracies. The focus here is on domestic strife, with the Canadian auteur’s signature body horror serving mainly as a metaphor for the breakdown of a nuclear family. Inspired by Cronenberg’s messy divorce from his first wife, THE BROOD begins after Nola Carveth (Samantha Eggar) has abandoned her husband Frank (Art Hindle) and five-year-old daughter Candy to take part in an experimental psychotherapy retreat without any definite plan of coming home. Nola still sees Candy on weekends, and when Frank goes to retrieve their daughter after a visit, he discovers that the child’s body is covered in scratches and bruises. He begins to investigate what’s going on at the retreat and discovers that the experimental therapy is giving way to the creation of Lovecraftian beasts. The head doctor of the retreat, Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed), has created a process called psychoplasmics, wherein patients expunge their repressed emotions by channeling them into physical transformations. Some patients leave the retreat with scabs and abrasions, while others emerge with freakish, cancerous growths. What, then, is happening to Nola? And why are the people with whom she enters into conflict getting killed off by monstrous small children? As usual, Cronenberg presents the bizarre, lurid story with somber precision, rooting the horror in relatable emotions and realistic locations—which, in turn, he defamiliarizes with the unusual content. Consider the opening sequence, which plunges viewers into Dr. Raglan’s role-playing session with a male patient. Cronenberg begins in closeup, denying viewers any context for the men’s relationship; when he cuts to medium shots, he shows them to be on stage in an auditorium, which poses more questions as to what they’re doing. The rest of THE BROOD proceeds in a similar fashion, as Cronenberg limits the contextualizing information so that one always feels uncomfortably close to whatever’s happening. The intimacy of the nightmare is consistent with the director’s other horror films, which force viewers to reflect on their relationships to their own bodies. Yet Cronenberg’s body horror is ultimately existential in nature—what does it say about our identities, his films ask, if they can be corrupted by forces from without? In THE BROOD, those forces include psychotherapy as well as marital breakdown; in a sense, the movie would find its complement in Cronenberg’s later A DANGEROUS METHOD (2011), which considered the relationship between Freud and Jung. Screening as part of Queer Film Theory 101. (1979, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
John Carpenter’s IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS (US)
FACETS Cinema – Saturday, 7pm
GHOSTS OF MARS (2001), CIGARETTE BURNS (2005), and THE WARD (2010) all have their defenders (and rightfully so), but IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS is the last John Carpenter film to win a cult following on par with that of THE THING (1982) or THEY LIVE (1988). Like those earlier Carpenter masterpieces, MADNESS didn’t make a splash on first release, opening in early 1995 to mixed reviews and middling box office returns. Maybe after a year of such grandstanding, elephantine American movies as FORREST GUMP, NATURAL BORN KILLERS, THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, and PULP FICTION, Carpenter’s tribute to H.P. Lovecraft (another quirky American genre storyteller) seemed too modest in its themes and too goofy in its execution for most people to take it seriously. (Leave it to Jonathan Rosenbaum and the staff of Cahiers du cinéma to buck the trend: the former wrote a thoughtful essay on the film for the Chicago Reader, and the latter named it one of the ten best of the year.) Over time, MADNESS has revealed itself to be a multilayered work that rewards repeat viewings, presenting ideas about the power of storytelling and employing clever meta-cinematic formal jokes—it’s got to be Carpenter’s most self-reflexive movie. Projecting the right mix of charisma and snark, Sam Neill stars as an insurance investigator hired to track down a popular horror writer who’s gone missing. His search takes him to New Hampshire and, ultimately, into the setting of many of the writer’s books—a creepy small town that’s a composite of recurring locales in the work of Lovecraft and Stephen King. This transition from the real world to the fictional world isn’t the first or last time in MADNESS when reality gets shaken by storytelling. Soon after the movie starts, Neill’s character learns that the writer’s latest book is literally driving people insane; near the end, the writer appears and literally unleashes unholy beasts on the world. The story may sound silly on the page, but under Carpenter’s inspired direction, it’s exciting and often quite scary. (1994, 95 min, Blu-Ray Projection) [Ben Sachs]
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Screening with Paul W.S. Anderson’s 1997 film EVENT HORIZON (96 min, Digital Projection) as part of the Cold Sweat series. Also screening as part of the series are Ken Russell’s 1980 film ALTERED STATES (102 min, Digital Projection) and his 1988 film THE LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM (93 min, Digital Projection) on Friday at 7pm and 9pm, respectively. More info here.
Quentin Dupieux's DAAAAAALÍ! (France)
Music Box Theatre — See Venue website for showtimes
In the years since he mounted his return to his home turf, it has been extremely heartening to watch Quentin Dupieux's directorial profile rise amidst his anarchic reign of terror over the French domestic box office, wherein he has put his name on a whopping eight feature films, each and every one an outrageously shaggy, sub-80-minute surrealist whimsy. That the onetime underground dance producer and director of novelty B-movie shlock like RUBBER (2010) and WRONG COPS (2013) would metamorphose into an accomplished fabulist in the tradition of Jean de la Fontaine—and, even more amazingly, emerge as something of a French counterpart to Hong Sang-soo, drawing an increasingly impressive roster of A-list actors into his orbit as he produces hasty skits and improvisational doodles at a relentless clip—remains shocking to me. Enter DAAAAAALÍ!, an anti-biographical portrait of Salvador Dalí and a giddy exercise in cinematic cubism that refuses any meaningful gesture towards historicity at every turn. For the most part, the film is unchecked delirium; so silly it really ought to come with some kind of a warning. It putatively depicts the attempts of a journalist (Anaïs Demoustier) to conduct an interview with the famed surrealist (played with gusto by no less than five different actors, who have a tendency to hand over the reins mid-scene), but it quickly becomes apparent that there is no center whatsoever as the film all-but disintegrates into a veritable hall of mirrors, unleashing a nonstop barrage of surreal sight gags and meta fake-outs that confound and distort the narrative beyond recognition. DAAAAAALÍ! clearly aims to capture Salvador Dalí not quite as he lived, but rather as he exists in the public imagination, sculpting all of that psychic data into a slice of free-associative majesty that embodies the essence of Dalí's art by repeatedly flipping the bird at the space-time continuum. In short, it's melted clocks everywhere you look. (2023, 77 min, DCP Digital) [David Whitehouse]
Johan Grimonprez’s SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D’ETAT (Belgium/France/Documentary)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 6:30pm [SOLD OUT]
If you don’t know about the CIA’s involvement in the overthrow of democratically elected Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba in 1960, SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D’ETAT offers an essential history lesson; and befitting a movie with soundtrack in the title, the music is killer as well. That’s because, in addition to being about geopolitics, SOUNDTRACK covers one of the most robust periods in jazz history, touching on the bebop and free jazz movements through such figures as Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, and Charles Mingus. These artists, along with Nina Simone and Louis Armstrong, were also unwitting actors in the Cold War, it turns out. Drawing on impeccably documented research, SOUNDTRACK explains how their music was used to sell American culture to people around the world (particularly behind the Iron Curtain) and how "goodwill concerts" in African nations were often fronts for espionage activity organized by the CIA. Director Johan Grimonprez cuts between footage of various jazz giants and vintage documentary material of the United Nations, the Congo, and other crucial sites in the short history of the Pan-African movement, culminating with Lumumba’s assassination; in doing so, he conveys how far-reaching the Cold War was while creating an engaging sense of counterpoint between political and artistic histories. The musicians profiled here represented the vanguard of Black creative expression, while some of the other subjects (Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah, Malcolm X) represented the vanguard of Black political thought; they’re united by the fact that the CIA undermined them all. Grimonprez highlights this historical obscenity by relating the excitement around both jazz and revolutionary Black political movements in the late 1950s, which inspired people to believe in alternatives to white supremacy in both culture and third world politics. Ultimately, the film is about how different the world seemed when these alternatives were being seriously considered and the dominance of Western corporate interests over global affairs wasn’t so depressingly certain. Please note this is a members-only preview screening that is sold out. The film begins its regular run at the Siskel Center on November 22. (2024, 150 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
🎞️ ALSO SCREENING
⚫ Alamo Drafthouse
León Klimovsky’s 1972 Spanish horror film THE VAMPIRES’ NIGHT ORGY (84 min, Digital Projection) screens Tuesday, 9:30pm, as part of Terror Tuesdays, programmed by John Dickson from the Oscbarbate Film Collective. More info here.
⚫ Athenaeum Center (2936 N. Southport Ave.)
The official public opening of the Roger Deakins Photography Exhibition takes place Friday at 7pm with Team Deakins in person.
Deakins also in person on Sunday in conjunction with the release of his new book, Byways, with a book signing from 11:30am to 1:30pm and a screening of Frank Darapont’s 1994 film THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION (142 min, Digital Projection) starting at 2:45pm. More info here.
⚫ Block Cinema (at Northwestern University)
Background Echoes: Mexicanness and the Production of Race in Hollywood, a lecture-screening interweaving a selection of eleven 35mm trailers from the Academy Film Archive with an insightful presentation by Laura Isabel Serna, Associate Professor in the Van Hunnick History Department and the Division of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California, takes place Friday starting at 5pm. This lecture-screening is programmed in conjunction with the 2024 Backward Glances conference and will serve as one of its keynote presentations.
Rea Tajiri’s 1997 film STRAWBERRY FIELDS (90 min, Digital Projection) screens Thursday, 7pm, with
Tajiri in person for a post-screening conversation with Paloma Martinez, Assistant Professor of
Radio/TV/Film at Northwestern. Free admission for both. 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 Film Archives and the Chicago Film Society
Chicago Film Archives and the Chicago Film Society present Chicago Home Movie Day at the Chicago History Museum (1601 N. Clark St.) on Saturday from 11am until 3pm with live accompaniment from pianist David Drazin. Archivists and projectionists will be on hand to inspect and project a selection of attendees’ celluloid home movies in 16mm, 8mm, or Super 8. More info here.
⚫ Chicago Filmmakers
The Group 312 Films 2024 Annual Report, including a selection of films that represent the highlights of the past year’s work, takes place Saturday at 7pm. More info here.
⚫ Chicago Public Library
View all screenings taking place at Chicago Public Library branches here.
⚫ Doc Films at the University of Chicago
Nathaniel Dorsky’s 1983 short film PNEUMA (28 min, 16mm) and 1987 short film 17 REASONS WHY (19 min, 16mm), and Jerome Hiller’s 2011 short film WORDS OF MERCURY (25 min, 16mm), screen Sunday, 8pm, as part of the Devotional Cinema of Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler series.
Carlos Carrera’s 2002 film EL CRIMEN DEL PADRE AMARO (118 min, 35mm) screens Wednesday, 7pm, as part of the Mexican Romance: Through the Heart of the Nation series. More info on all screenings here.
⚫ FACETS Cinema
Family Fall Fun Day takes place Sunday starting at 10:30am. View the whole program here.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
The annual 24-hour MUSIC BOX OF HORRORS movie marathon runs from 12pm Saturday to 12pm Sunday. Please note that all passes for this event are SOLD OUT.
As part of Music Box of Horrors: The Dream Child month-long series, Jim Gillespie’s 1997 horror film I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER (101 min, 35mm) screens Monday at 9:45pm; Carlos Enrique Taboada’s 1986 Mexican horror film POISON FOR THE FAIRIES (89 min, DCP Digital) on Tuesday at 9:45pm and is free for Music Box members; Fruit Chan’s 2004 Hong Kong horror film DUMPLINGS (91 min, DCP Digital) on Wednesday at 9:45pm, co-presented by Clean Plate Club: A Food and Film Series with the option to buy a ticket that comes with two bacos (bao-tacos), one egg roll, and two veggie dumplings from Saucy Porka; and Don Sharp’s 1973 British horror film PSYCHOMANIA (85 min, 35mm) on Thursday at 9:30pm, co-presented by Motoblot with a Riders Rendezvous at Hexe Coffee (2000 W. Diversey Ave.) at 6pm and kick-stands up at 8:30pm for a HELL RIDE to The Music Box Theatre (costumes are encouraged!).
Stacey and Michael's Showcase of Shorts 8 takes place Wednesday at 7pm. More info on all screenings and events here.
⚫ Sideshow Gelato (4819 N. Western Ave.)
SUPER-HORROR-RAMA! presents William Castle’s 1959 film THE TINGLER (82 min, Digital Projection) on Wednesday, 7:30pm, as part of a weekly horror gathering and screening series, with a social hour starting at 6pm and a surprise short feature and giveaways at 7pm. 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: October 18 - October 24, 2024
MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Michael Castelle, Maxwell Courtright, Kyle Cubr, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Josephine Ferorelli, Shaun Huhn, Ben Kaye, Joshua Minsoo Kim, Raphael Jose Martinez, Nicky Ni, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Dmitry Samarov, Drew Van Weelden, K.A. Westphal, David Whitehouse