:: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 6 - THURSDAY, OCTOBER 12 ::

🎉 THE 59TH CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

The 59th Chicago International Film Festival begins at the Music Box Theatre Wednesday night with two Chicago-set films: the Opening Night selection, Minhai Baig’s WE GROWN NOW (2023, 93 min, DCP Digital), screens at 7pm, and Clare Cooney’s DEPARTING SENIORS (2023, 85 min, DCP Digital) screens at 10pm. Regular screenings begin on Thursday at the AMC NEWCITY 14 and continue at multiple venues through Sunday, October 22. Check back next week for our coverage of select festival titles. For more information, including all titles, venues, showtimes, and ticket prices, check out the festival website here.

🏳️‍🌈 REELING 2023: THE 41ST CHICAGO LGBTQ+ INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Reeling, the 41st Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival, continues virtually through Sunday. Select reviews of available films are featured below. View the full schedule and more info here.

Theo Montoya’s ANHELL69 (Colombia)
Screening virtually here – This film can only be viewed in Illinois
As a camera slowly pans around what is assumed to be his childhood bedroom, filmmaker and narrator Theo Montoya states, “I fell in love with the movies because it was the only place where I could cry.” Combining documentary, experimental filmmaking, and personal essay, ANHELL69 is a mesh of styles, free flowing through time. The title references a science fiction B-movie Montoya was working on some years ago, and this contemporary version weaves emotional audition footage with newly shot, dreamlike images of his concept. Anhell69 is also the Instagram handle of Montoya’s intended lead for the film, who passed away very shortly after casting. The original film was about ghosts, as is this new iteration. Rather than the imagined setting of his dystopic fiction, Montoya reflects on the real-world dangers and hardships of being queer in Medellín, Colombia, and the many friends he’s lost due to suicide and drug overdose. ANHELL69 presents an audiovisual diary of his friends and their experiences, which pushes beyond the confines of a narrative feature into something more personal and reflective, particularly of the importance and impact of chosen family. Slow-moving apocalyptic yet contemporary shots of the city interrupt at times, the politics of the moment made completely present. Documentary footage of protests intercut with eerie shots of his red-eyed cinematic ghosts, directly addressing the folding in of reality and fiction. Imagining his own funeral procession throughout the film—the car carrying his body driven by his favorite director, Víctor Gaviria—Montoya reflects throughout ANHELL69 on the importance of documenting his culture and friends. There's a hope that their memory—pieced together through this wide variety of footage—is not a ghostly presence but a real, affecting one. Screening as part of the QuE3R FrAm3s Series, programmed by former Cine-File managing editor Patrick Friel and Levi Sierra. (2022, 74 min) [Megan Fariello]
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Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren’s 20,000 SPECIES OF BEES (Spain)
Screening virtually here – This film can only be viewed in Illinois
Sofía Otero, who’s around 10 years old, won an acting prize at the Berlin Film Festival for this understated family drama, and one can appreciate why she was given the award: the whole movie hangs on her performance, which requires her to explore the most intimate aspects of her identity on screen. That’s a tall order for an actor of any age, let alone one so young, yet Otero is consistently graceful and unself-conscious in the role. 20,000 SPECIES OF BEES takes place over the course of a summer in which Otero’s character comes to realize she identifies as a girl during an extended visit to her grandmother’s home in the Basque country. Also along for the vacation are her mother (a sculptor who’s taking some time apart from her husband), two older siblings, aunt, and cousins. While the mother, brother and sister love Otero unconditionally from the start, the other members of her family are slower to accept her; the movie charts their development as well as Otero’s. The overall arc of the story recalls that of another recent European film, Emanuele Crialese’s L’IMMENSITÁ (2022), which also considered the maturation of a transgender child. The key difference is that Crialese observed his protagonist in early adolescence, when children are far more articulate about their needs than they are at eight or nine; the protagonist of 20,000 SPECIES reaches an understanding of her identity more through intuition. Sticking largely with this character’s perspective, Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren (making her feature debut as writer-director) emphasizes her physical, immediate experiences—going swimming, playing with her siblings and cousins, learning about her grandmother’s bee colony—and presents the adults in her life mostly when she overhears their conversations. The filmmaker’s naturalistic approach has the effect of normalizing an experience with which many spectators remain unfamiliar; the movie serves as a reminder of how cinema can dismantle social taboos simply by refusing to acknowledge them as such. Co-presented with Instituto Cervantes of Chicago. (2023, 128 min) [Ben Sachs]
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Meghan Weinstein’s HEALED (US)
Screening virtually here 
Considering that so many people have willingly given over their lives to their cellphones, it doesn’t seem so outlandish that an evil cabal would use cellphone technology to control other people’s lives. That’s one of the premises behind HEALED, which contains enough narrative turns to hold your interest over the course of its breezy 92 minutes. Shantell Yasmine Abeydeera, who wrote the script, also stars as a former pop singer who had one hit song in the 2000s and has since relaunched her career as the host of a successful podcast. Her pregnant wife is also popular online in some way or another; both characters seem to enjoy flexible work schedules that give them plenty of time to reflect on the state of their marriage. In one moment of reflection, the couple decides to take part in an experimental therapy retreat in the hope of freeing themselves of stress before their child is born. Veteran indie screenwriter and actress Guinevere Turner plays the therapist of the retreat, and as always she’s a welcome onscreen presence, adding to her characterization a sense of mysterious yet suave sophistication. The early, vaguely flirtatious conversations between Abeydeera and Turner are nicely paced and well played; you kind of miss them when the movie takes a turn into allegorical horror, as the couple discovers that their experimental therapy retreat is a literal psychological experiment and they’re being experimented on. In this development, HEALED touches on the unholy alliances between big tech companies and right-wing political interests, which are plenty scary without the genre plotting. (2023, 92 min) [Ben Sachs]

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Five Films by Fred Camper (US/Experimental)

Chicago Film Society at the Film Studies Center (Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E 60th Street) – Friday, 7pm

It’s been a major year for Fred Camper, with January finding the release of a compilation of his writings on Stan Brakhage (many of which were endorsed by Brakhage himself) and the rest of the year finding the gradual release of new video work on his website, the first moving image work he’s released since 1984. Camper’s reputation is largely as a Chicago-based critic and educator, spending stretches of his career teaching at various art colleges and working as a critic for the Chicago Reader from 1986 to 2011. Given his pedigree, it’s a bit surprising that his original film work from 1967-69 has gone mostly unseen since he removed it from Canyon Cinema’s catalog in the '70s. Thankfully the Chicago Film Society has rescued the five films from obscurity, hosting their new restorations at the Film Studies Center with Camper in attendance to discuss the work from a 50-odd year vantage point. There’s stylistic breadth to the films in CFS’ showcase, with A SENSE OF THE PAST (1967), WELCOME TO COME (1968), and BATHROOM (1969) all sharing an interest in defamiliarizing interior space, while JOAN GOES TO MISERY and DAN POTTER (the longest work at 39 minutes) are more idiosyncratic figurative work featuring Camper’s friends. Like the finest work of that 60’s/70’s golden age of American underground film, these are explorations that were (and still feel) truly new, both reverent to what had come before yet building new film language from the ground up. It’s through these direct-theoretical explorations that you see Camper’s intelligent dialogue with contemporaries like Brakhage and Larry Gottheim, but also a broader film-historical palette that includes Howard Hawks and F.W. Murnau. It’s a rejoinder to any who say you “can’t dance about literature” (or whatever their mismatched version of criticism-of-criticism is); this is criticism in action, film exploring the medium itself in the hands of a seasoned critic of the avant-garde. In this way the work might be seen as a friendlier American counterpart to the rigorous work of people like Malcolm Le Grice and Peter Gidal, two men for whom criticism and filmmaking are one and the same project. Whatever form his relationship with film takes, one can be sure Camper is an endless well of reflection and a fixture of Chicago film culture. (1967 - 1969, Total approx. 79 min, 16mm) [Maxwell Courtright]

Želimir Žilnik in Chicago

Conversations at the Edge at the Gene Siskel Film Center – See below for showtimes

Želimir Žilnik's MARBLE ASS (Federal Republic of Yugoslavia)
Friday, 6pm
Želimir Žilnik was already well into a storied career as one of the premier directors of Yugoslavia’s Black Wave when he made MARBLE ASS, though you wouldn’t know it from the film’s anarchic feel. It has more in common with the concurrent Queer New Wave than with anything other filmmakers his age were putting out, due in part to the director’s collaboration with star Verjan Miladinović (also known mononymously as Melinka), a prominent sex worker in Belgrade and one of Yugoslavia’s first openly out crossdressers, here playing a thinly fictionalized version of himself (also named Melinka). The film spends time with Merlinka and Salena (Milja Milenković); they're two sex workers living together and struggling to make ends meet when Merlinka’s ex-boyfriend Džoni (Nenad Racković) comes back unannounced from the Yugoslav War and situates himself in their apartment. Džoni is a war-damaged bundle of machismo who instantly connects with a friend to run a scam involving betting on fixed pool games. There’s an irony of course in the way this supposed hero returns only to freeload off of those still in the trenches, so to speak, of sex work. He’s both the most dangerous and least resilient of the bunch, a shell that was useful as a disposable body in civil war and who now has only tricks and Mike Patton-like looks to go on. But the film doesn’t put all its focus on this volatility, letting the dreamer-scammer drift violently in and out of the story as a more naturalistic portrait of friendship in the sex trade plays out. Džoni exists like the war itself, something both "out there" and close to home, where the violent few are a threat to all. This bleak realism alternates on a dime with a fun irreverence, linking the film to the Queer New Wave, which acknowledged (about 30 years before our current discourse, mind you) that good queer art cannot be purely miserablist but also cannot fully ditch miserablism. Most good queer art, especially of the period and especially of the Eastern bloc, needs to recognize the flipside of the coin of progress, acknowledging that even having fun is politicized by historical and present threats of violence. On top of the very real political text of the film, there’s a tenderness towards Milenka specifically, made all the more touching because of the precarity of the real-life Milenka. Like John Waters and Divine, Žilnik and Miladinović form a de facto auteur team here where a real-life radical’s charisma refuses to be held down by the norms of plot and character, jumping through the screen to demand equal billing. The camera can’t look away, sort of lovingly sexualizing as it traces the contours of an icon similar to how Gregg Araki’s equally humane and horny lens studies his wayward youths. Overall, MARBLE ASS is another great reminder for us all that films don’t have to sacrifice form or intellect to be fun and hot too. Žilnik in person. (1995, 86 min, 35mm) [Maxwell Courtright]
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Želimir Žilnik’s LOGBOOK SERBISTAN (Serbia)
Saturday, 1pm
An early onscreen title of LOGBOOK SERBISTAN informs us that approximately 45,000 displaced people passed through Serbia en route to the European Union in 2014. As if in defiance of the dry, straightforward nature of that statistic, the film that follows is scattershot, personable, and sometimes even funny. It is clearly the work of a master. To make it, Želimir Žilnik recruited several migrants then living in Serbia (their home countries include Nigeria, Ghana, Syria, and Afghanistan), then collaborated with them on scenes based on their lives there. The film introduces the subjects almost at random; some appear only once, while others appear frequently. It’s a poignant representation of their transient experience of Serbia; at the same time, Žilnik gives each participant enough screen time to make an impression as a genuine individual. Most memorable are the two men from Ghana who gab philosophically about everything from contemporary African politics to Fela Kuti lyrics; there’s a wonderful scene near the end where they speak good-naturedly with a Serbian woman about the sexual habits of men in polygamous versus monogamous relationships. Just as compelling is the small family of migrants who end up renting a home at a border town for cheap when they learn that most of the locals have left for the cities, simply leaving their houses behind. What’s most surprising about LOGBOOK SERBISTAN may be how welcoming are all the Serbians whom the film’s principal subjects come into contact with. The movie climaxes at a small-town bean festival where Žilnik fosters an encounter in which two Nigerian men join several old women in a traditional country dance. Later, a young man approaches the Africans and asks to know what their deal is; for a moment you’re unsure if he’s some kind of nativist punk. He ends up giving the Nigerians a tour of the festival and convinces his dad to let them stay at his place for the night. The other Serbians who appear onscreen may not be as generous as him, but no one comes off as mean. While this reflects a skewed perspective (surely there’s an anti-immigrant population in Serbia just like there is everywhere else), it’s refreshing to see a film that imagines what a humane world where everyone can recognize when another person’s in trouble and thinks of what they can do to help. Žilnik in person. (2015, 94 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Allison Anders, Dean Lent and Kurt Voss’ BORDER RADIO (US)

Chicago Film Society at Northeastern Illinois University (The Auditorium, Building E 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.) – Wednesday, 7:30pm

Allison Anders, Dean Lent and Kurt Voss’ post-punk saga is a grab-bag of influences and styles, a neo-noir Western New Wave homage that still feels supremely of its moment and its scene. The filmmaking trio began the project as grad students at UCLA (where they were admirers of Billy Woodbury, who then worked in the equipment rental office); finishing it turned into a four-year process, during which the scene it was depicting slowly eroded into a thing of the past. This only adds to its mottled appeal, making the film work where perhaps a more polished version wouldn’t. Anders’ sister, Luanna, stars as Lu, a music critic whose husband, Jeff (played by Chris D. of the Flesh Eaters), has run off to Mexico after becoming embroiled in a low-stakes robbery. Alone with their young daughter, she seeks to find out where he went and why, calling on his roadie, Chris, and bandmate, Dean (John Doe of the punk band X), for hints as to his sudden departure. If it’s a neo-noir or a revisionist Western, then it’s the slacker version of both genres. There’s no real sense of urgency, the crime in question a MacGuffin of sorts. The film is more of a languid waltz through story and setting, taking us here, there, and everywhere, showing glimpses of the 1980s LA’s music scene and moving the film forward slowly and only somewhat surely in the process. Adding to the menagerie of styles are the occasional interview, such as with the couple’s daughter (played by Anders’ real-life child) and a local groupie, that make it appear to be a documentary or news story; in contrast are evocatively composed sequences, complemented by co-director Dean Lent’s wonderfully grainy black-and-white cinematography. In a directors’ commentary for the film’s Criterion release, Anders (who would go on to direct more feminist-oriented indie films like GAS FOOD LODGING [1992] and MI VIDA LOCA [1993]) and Voss, a one-time couple who had worked together as production assistants on Wim Wenders’ PARIS, TEXAS (1984), discuss a push-pull dynamic in trying to make either Jeff or Lu the de facto main character. Voss concedes that Anders “won.” Indeed, it’s Lu’s search, her investigation-lite into Jeff’s disappearance and the original theft that resulted in his flight. Anders has mentioned Sam Fuller’s FORTY GUNS (1947) as a particular favorite, and one feels its influence in how Lu wrangles the men around her to get the answers she needs. Both a love letter and a time capsule, BORDER RADIO will make you wistful for something that was fading even as Anders, Lent and Voss were attempting to capture its grimy effulgence on film. Preceded by an ’80s indie trailer reel (10 min, 35mm). (1987, 87 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]

Ang Lee's SENSE AND SENSIBILITY (UK)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Wednesday, 7pm

During pre-production for SENSE AND SENSIBILITY, Ang Lee commented to executive producer James Schamus that 19th century British society seemed much closer to modern-day Chinese society than modern-day British society, and that was one reason why he was so drawn to adapt Jane Austen’s classic novel. Lee had recently bridged cultures and genres with aplomb in THE WEDDING BANQUET (1993), blending humor and pathos in English and Mandarin. Finding commonalities and making foreign cultural norms and intricacies deeply relatable and surprisingly funny became Lee’s trademark across his oeuvre, and he employs it skillfully in SENSE AND SENSIBILITY. The film is bolstered by a sharp screenplay by Emma Thompson, who also stars in the film as pragmatic and demure spinster-to-be Elinor Dashwood. Thompson spent over four years laboring over her inaugural screenplay, afraid of not doing justice to the source material. Though much of the elegant and witty description had to be rendered visible through lush and historically accurate scenery (the film was shot merely a few miles from Austen’s home in southwestern England) instead of text, Austen’s wit and humor shine, especially through the supporting cast. Thompson even read lines with each of the actors auditioning for their roles to ensure that they would strike the right tone with Lee’s vision. The result is a marvelous cast of comedians, including Hugh Grant in a typical shy and bumbling role as Elinor's love interest, Edward Ferrars; Harriet Walter as deliciously conniving and arrogant Fanny Ferrars, Elinor's sister-in-law; and Hugh Laurie and Imelda Staunton as a genteel couple with clashing personalities. Kate Winslet brings melodramatic flair and earnest feeling to Marianne Dashwood, who falls for a Byronic hero in the dashing Willoughby (played by Greg Wise) while Colonel Brandon (Alan Rickman, in a sensitive and understated role) quietly pines for her affection. SENSE AND SENSIBILITY depicts a time of oppressive patriarchal roles and repressive class structures that resonate across two centuries, thanks to Thompson's screenplay and Lee's discerning eye. I dare say, should I be so bold as to speak propitiously of that which may be disproportionately interpreted, that this film could, perhaps, in some small sense, be one of the most outstanding and finely executed adaptations of a novel to humbly grace the silver screen. Screening as part of the Films of Ang Lee series. (1995, 136 min, 35mm) [Alex Ensign]

William Richert’s WINTER KILLS (US)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

It’s an entertaining exercise in futility trying to keep up with the ever-unraveling plot machinations of WINTER KILLS. Almost playing out like some kind of proto-Coen Brothers picture, William Richert’s adaptation of the Richard Condon conspiratorial novel of the same name was seen as almost too close of a riff on the still-fresh-at-the-time JFK assassination, taking a moment of deep political tragedy and attempting to unfurl it by, in the process, proving that trying to find meaning in such a grand act of terror can often be meaningless in and of itself. A whirlwind of actors fills the frame, from John Huston as a bravado capitalist father figure to Anthony Perkins as a mysterious accountant to Belinda Bauer as a reporter with more secrets than she’s letting on. And of course, amidst other blink-and-you’ll-miss-them appearances from such greats as Toshiro Mifune, Sterling Hayden, and a practically dialogue-less Elizabeth Taylor, is our leading man played by a baby-faced Jeff Bridges, attempting to piece together the mystery of who assassinated his President brother. This is not a film for those seeking answers; rather, it’s that delirious kind of movie for those who love to answer a question with even more questions, getting lost in the mania of character actors all trying to get on top. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a shaggy dog chasing its own tail, refusing to stop. And even when you do uncover some sense of this mystery, all that’s left is just rich people staying rich, those in power retaining their power, and a trail of unheard voicemail messages to the woman who won’t give you the time of day. (1979, 97 min, 35mm) [Ben Kaye]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Herk Harvey’s CARNIVAL OF SOULS (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday, 8:30pm and Tuesday, 6:30pm

Herk Harvey spent his life making industrial and educational films, a career steeped in the confines of cinema as instruction. Yet his legacy is fated to remain with his sole feature film, CARNIVAL OF SOULS, a movie that relishes in cinema’s innate ability to provide a visual vocabulary for the language of dreams. Harvey has often been cited as saying he wanted to make a film with "the look of Bergman and the feel of Cocteau,” yet in the process, he ended up crafting a visual language all his own, a nightmarescape of the darkest parts of the psyche brought to horrifying life. Beginning with a drag race ending in disaster, our young heroine Mary (an effervescent Candace Hilligoss) emerges from the water, ready to put this disaster behind her and never look back, amidst the haunting lurch of the afterlife forever following her every move. Questions begin to arise: did Mary actually perish in the car crash and this is all just a deathly hallucination of her journey to the afterlife? Did she indeed survive and the trauma of this incident is haunting her at every moment? Or is the specter of death trying to reclaim her to join the land of the dead where she truly belongs? If you’re truthfully looking for the answer to that question, then you’re looking for the wrong things in Harvey’s picture, a movie more focused on the terror of dreams than the logic of a car crash. The way the camera acts as a means of jumping from moment to moment, scenes melding into each other with a single cut, the language of cinema acting as a visual stream-of-consciousness, moments flowing into each other seamlessly. It culminates in a haunting fantasia of a finale, where Mary comes face to face with the souls who have long been haunting her, and the choice to evade them or embrace them. Screening as part of the One and Done series. (1962, 78 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Robert Weine's THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (Germany/Silent)

Music Box Theatre – Sunday, 2:30pm and 7pm

THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI is the definitive German Expressionist film, one in which all the elements of the mise-en-scene (lighting, set design, costume design, makeup, props, the movement of figures within the frame, etc.) have been deliberately distorted and exaggerated for expressive purposes. The end result, a view of the world as seen through the eyes of a madman, single-handedly inaugurated Expressionism in the movies in 1920, a movement that would then go on to dominate German cinema screens for most of the rest of the decade. No mere museum piece, the influence of THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI is happily still very much with us today (Martin Scorsese's SHUTTER ISLAND, John Carpenter's THE WARD, and Tim Burton's entire career would be unthinkable without it), and if you care at all about film history then you need to see this. Long seen only in faded, scratched and often incomplete prints, this new digital restoration—based on the original camera negative—runs 75 minutes and renders a ridiculous amount of never-before-seen detail in the film's striking visual design, including even paint brush strokes on the intentionally artificial-looking sets that surround the actors. (The first reel of the camera negative is missing so note how the image quality makes a leap around the 10-minute mark from looking merely excellent to looking as if it were shot yesterday.) Screening as part of Bride of Music Box of Horrors with a live score by the Invincible Czars. (1920, 75 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Glover Smith]

Bill Gunn's GANJA AND HESS (US)

Music Box Theatre – Tuesday, 9:15pm

Any screening of GANJA AND HESS is cause for celebration, not least because it almost never existed in the first place. Its original producers, Kelly/Jordan Enterprises, were eager to capitalize on the commercial viability of BLACULA, which was released the year prior. Gunn, who was a fixture in the NYC theater scene, and had written the screenplay for Hal Ashby’s THE LANDLORD, was tapped for the project. Though he was leery of working in the Blaxploitation genre, Gunn saw an opportunity to use studio resources to bring about his own audacious vision. The result, despite winning the Critics Prize at Cannes in 1973, was a wholesale departure from the script approved by Kelly/Jordan, who subsequently sold the film, which lead to it being cut from 112 to 78 minutes and re-released under the guise of a handful of other titles like BLOOD COUPLE, DOUBLE POSSESSION, and so on. The original version was virtually unavailable for decades until MoMA restored a 35mm negative several years ago, enabling a Kino-Lorber re-release. If the producers were expecting anything resembling a formulaic Blaxploitation movie—or, for that matter, something with any semblance of a conventional narrative—you can see why they were dismayed by the final product. GANJA AND HESS is less campy B-movie and more Ingmar Bergman or David Lynch, with a plot that’s deliberately enigmatic and driven by poetic symbolism. The film centers on Dr. Hess Green, an anthropologist stabbed by his deranged assistant (played by Gunn) with a diseased dagger from an ancient civilization, thereby causing him to metamorphose into a vampire (although the term “vampire” is never explicitly used throughout the film). The titular Ganja arrives not long after and is infected with the vampiric germ, prompting the couple to spend the rest of the film attempting to satiate their newfound bloodlust. It’s not hard to read vampirism in GANJA AND HESS as a thinly veiled metaphor for drug addiction, an interpretation that has been confirmed by producer Chiz Schultz, but there are deeper valences here. Tasked with making a Blaxploitation film, Gunn instead opted to use the trope of the vampire—a creature that’s all about sucking up human life force—to tell a story about the actual exploitation of Black people throughout history. Gunn’s film is not didactic, though. Instead, his thesis is embedded within the visual syntax of the film, which employs elaborate montage editing techniques to subliminally display signifiers—including nooses, body bags, and copious amounts of blood—that conjure up the atrocities of racism throughout American history. Along the way, he interpolates surreal (flash)back to Africa imagery, religious symbolism, and shots of various artworks from the Brooklyn Museum (a commentary, I think, on the reification of living people into things). Moreover, the half-human/half-other hybridity of the vampire is used here by Gunn as an analog to decry the ways in which Black people are systematically treated as less than human—put simply, GANJA AND HESS is a horror film made by a director who knew that reality is much more horrific than fiction. Screening as part of Bride of Music Box of Horrors with an introduction from RogerEbert.com associate editor Robert Daniels. (1973, 112 mins, DCP Digital) [Harrison Sherrod]

Billy Wilder’s STALAG 17 (US)

Music Box Theatre – Saturday and Sunday, 11:30am

I wouldn’t be surprised if the average moviegoer, unaware of directors’ filmographies, thought that Billy Wilder’s ACE IN THE HOLE (1951) and his next film, STALAG 17, were not made by the same director. The former is caustically bitter, pushing the bounds of even the most astringent of disbelievers with its no-holds-barred look at the overly ambitious and media circus-obsessed society; the latter, based on Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski’s Broadway play about their experiences as prisoners of war in Austria during World War II, at first reads like a proto-Hogan’s Heroes (the similarities so pronounced that Bevan and Trzcinski tried to sue the show’s production company but lost) in how it portrays a “slice of life” in a POW camp akin to something like The Office. The gags, they are a’plenty—and genuinely very humorous at that, Wilder’s signature drollery shining through in the adaptation he and Edwin Blum fashioned from the source material. It’s perhaps upon reflection that one begins to understand the film as a mordant farce, its broad comicality a smoke screen Wilder was using to conceal his political ambition. One might assume that Wilder’s trenchant attitude was influenced by having been born a Jew in Austria-Hungary and later having begun his film career in earnest in Berlin. And, perhaps in retrospect, that’s partly true. Once the film proved a great success in the US, Paramount wanted to release a dubbed version in Germany; the only thing was the film has a key, incendiary character—which I won’t say much about here, at risk of spoiling a major plot point—that the studio wanted to change from being German to Polish. Wilder was so incensed by this suggestion that he cut official ties with Paramount, remaining an independent producer for the rest of his career. The film centers on a group of men in the Stalag 17 barracks trying to suss out a stoolie from within their midst; their main suspect is a man called Sefton (William Holden), a loner who hordes cigarettes to trade with the Nazis for luxuries such as better food and the opportunity to mingle with the camp’s Russian female prisoners. The men resent him for this; when he bets against the success of two prisoners’ escape plan toward the beginning of the film and wins big when they’re caught and killed, they suspect him of being the mole. Interspersed throughout this central drama are subplots of varying seriousness, from the barrack’s goof, Animal (Robert Strauss, reprising his stage role), being obsessed with Betty Grable—an obsession that lends itself to a controversial moment where Animal and a barrack-mate share a dance, the latent homosexual undertones was one reason why the censors were taken aback—were to a shell-shocked prisoner who derives pleasure only from playing a makeshift flute. In general, however, it’s the pursuit of an informer that composes the gist of the film, with the wrongly accused Sefton endeavoring to find the real stoolie himself. Considering when it was made, then, it’s perhaps less about Wilder’s relationship to World War II than what was happening more contemporarily and locally: McCarthyism, the blacklist, and the people who named names to put on there. “Hollywood was rife with informers in that period,” writes Joseph McBride in his book, Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge, “and many American films of the 1950s, while unable to deal directly with the political corruption of their own industry, nevertheless concentrate on themes of betrayal and informing in one form or another, unusual in interpersonal relationships.” Wilder and Strauss were nominated for Best Director and Best Supporting Actor, respectively, at that year’s Oscars; Holden won for his role as Sefton. Francois Truffaut considered this to be Wilder’s best film, in part because of Sefton. “Sefton is intelligent; that’s why he acts as he does,” he wrote in an essay on the film. “For the first time in films the philosophy of the solitary man is elaborated; this film is an apologia for individualism… Sefton is alone because he wants to be alone.” Where something like Ernst Lubitsch’s TO BE OR NOT TO BE wields its sly subversion like a fashionable wink, STALAG 17 hides its provocations beneath the girth of broad comedy. (And because I’d be remiss not to mention this somewhere, Otto Preminger appears as a Nazi colonel.) Screening as part of Nobody's Perfect: Billy Wilder Matinees Part 2. (1953, 120 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Celine Song’s PAST LIVES (South Korea)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Saturday, 7pm

There is a lyric from a Little Feat song that has stuck with me all the years since I first heard it: "All the love that you missed / All the people that you can’t recall / Do they really exist at all?" In one sense, this is an egotistical way of looking at past relationships, using oneself as the only reference point. On the other hand, who we and those we knew were in the past no longer exist in the present. We move on. We change. We slough off our old skins, year after year. This idea informs director/screenwriter Celine Song’s debut feature, PAST LIVES. As children in South Korea, Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) and Na Young (Greta Lee) were very close. Then, Na Young’s family emigrated to Canada. As many of us have done, Hae Sung and Na Young, now called Nora, used the internet to reconnect. But the strain of holding onto the past and trying to forge an adult life and career proves too much for Nora, and she backs away. Still, what Koreans call in-yun—a personal bond that can connect souls through lifetimes—pulls Hae Sung and Nora back together. What Song does in PAST LIVES is not indulge the Western concept of soul mates, but rather honors the important connections we make during our lives that do not overcome our circumstances, but rather give us the good memories that sustain us. Yoo and Lee convince us of their bond, even across wonky Skype calls, but delicately show that their characters have plans and commitments that are more important to them than a future together based on a long-ago love. In some ways, this film reminded me of CASABLANCA (1942), and that’s a high compliment indeed. Screening as part of the New Releases & Miscellaneous Screenings series. (2023, 106 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Alex Proyas' THE CROW (US)

Music Box Theatre – Friday, 10pm

In 1992 underground filmmaker Dave Markey released a film about the bands Sonic Youth and Nirvana with the title 1991: THE YEAR PUNK BROKE. Two years later, Kurt Cobain would be dead, THE CROW would be released, and 1994 became The Year That Goth Broke. Based on James O'Barr's comic of same name, history has shown THE CROW to be a surprisingly important artifact of sub/counterculture. Its story is fairly simple: a young couple is murdered the night before Halloween and one year later the man returns from the grave to avenge their deaths. While the plot is so very Gothic in the most literary of definitions, the aesthetics of the film are incredibly gothic in the "goth" sense. Both the source material and film have characters named after members of the band Joy Division. And despite being set in Detroit, the world of THE CROW feels far more similar to the terrifying, nameless City of Perpetual Rain that SE7EN (1995) exists in. Detroit here is a metonym for the post-industrial death of Any City, USA; the city itself as the undead. Tre goth, no? Youth culture and the global counterculture were still in a state of shock when THE CROW was released in May of 1994. It had only been 5 weeks since Cobain killed himself. Couple that with the fact that the lead of THE CROW, Brendan Lee, died on set during the making of the film due to a staged gunshot gone wrong, and you have a film that spoke to a segment of younger people who were dealing with meaningful death for likely the first time. Here was a film that dealt with loss, grief, and hope and that said it was okay to embrace darkness from time to time. A film whose second lead, an angry adolescent, was dealing with grief on-screen. THE CROW also handily came with a perfectly moody soundtrack available for purchase and blasting at "Fuck you Dad!" volume in your bedroom. With Nine Inch Nails covering Joy Division, the first new song from the Cure in two years, and heavy black-clad hitters like the Jesus and Mary Chain and My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, the CD landed in over 3 million hands. Having its lead die could have very well stopped THE CROW from being completed, but instead, to mixed opinions, it carried on. An undead film itself. To figure out a workaround for scenes that still required Lee's face, the filmmakers helped develop some of the most cutting-edge digital effects to date. THE CROW introduced, for the first time, the large-scale use of digital effects—specifically face swapping—that subsequent films like THE MATRIX (1999) and THE SOCIAL NETWORK (2010) needed to even tell their stories. It seems as though the technical feats of this film are rarely spoken of because of the heaviness that brought them on, as if pointing to them is to say, "Well, it's kind of a good thing Lee died, because otherwise..." THE CROW may be a simple film, a one man against an army of villains type of a thing—the source material references SEVEN SAMURAI (1954) by name as a comparison—but there's a poetic lyricism to the way it's told. In simplest terms this is a zombie revenge film, but the fact that no one ever seems to discuss it as a zombie film speaks to its (at least slight) transcendence beyond genre cinema. The repertory screenings I've programmed and been to have always been well attended, and at 30 years on now include entire families coming to see it. It's become a generational staple. Even the Cure finally added their song from the film's soundtrack to their live set for the first time in 2016 because the people who grew up watching THE CROW kept demanding it. Back in the '90s and '00s there was a joke in the goth community that went "Friends don't let friends dress like The Crow." It was the goth equivalent of "don't wear the shirt of the band you're going to see live." Thank God that kind of weird gatekeeping seems to be dead, or at least dying, when it comes to millennials and zoomers, because there's nothing to be ashamed about in loving THE CROW. After all, it can't rain all the time. Screening as part of Bride of Music Box of Horrors with pre-show festivities in the Music Box Lounge starting at 8pm and actress Bai Ling in person for a post-screening Q&A. Co-presented by the Horror House. (1994, 102 min, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]

Jess Franco’s BLOODY MOON (Spain)

Music Box Theatre – Tuesday, 7pm

Beyond prolific exploitation director Jess Franco’s BLOODY MOON relies on recognizable tropes that it simultaneously distorts, making for an arrestingly peculiar take on the slasher genre. After being institutionalized for murdering a young woman, disfigured Miguel (Alexander Waechter) returns five years later to his sister, Manuela (Nadja Gerganoff), who now runs a language boarding school on the Spanish coast. Their incestuous relationship and their need to hide it further complicates his position there. The return of Miguel also marks the sudden return of the killings; the murderer seems predominantly focused on late arrival Angela (Olivia Pascal). It’s familiar—there are killer POV shots, threatening anonymous phone calls, teens at summer camp vibes—but BLOODY MOON also feels completely alien. While horror is certainly filled with interesting sound stingers, Franco’s warping noises are as strange and varied as they are startling. Combined with the intense '80s score and Europop music, it’s a wild soundscape. Franco’s color palette, too, is striking, a dreamy mix of pastels and bold neons, all fitting into the European coastal setting. The costumes, including a curious parade of oversized sweaters, add to the bizarreness of the characters and performances. The closeups of inexplicable reactions—Angela’s friend Inga (Jasmin Losensky) has the most memorable of these—and the staging often feels unhinged. The sense of voyeurism common to the genre is also presented so peculiarly; new or little examined characters seem to appear out of nowhere as witnesses to the violence. It all somehow comes together, however, as a memorable example of the horror subgenre. This is certainly in large part to Franco’s camera, which skillfully maneuvers through, piecing together all the eccentricity, creating arrestingly gorgeous visuals along the way. Presented by Oscarbate & Severin Films, with a Severin Pop-Up shop before and after the film in the Music Box Lounge. (1981, 85 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

David Byrne's TRUE STORIES (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 8:30pm

Among other things, David Byrne's film is simultaneously a satire of television and a celebration of television. Two musical numbers specifically appropriate TV. "Wild Wild Life" has various characters lip synching to the song in front of a giant bank of video monitors, which all show a seemingly endless mélange of stock footage. "Love For Sale" is even more direct, featuring Byrne's band Talking Heads interacting with actual 80's era TV commercials before eventually transforming into chocolate-coated, foil-wrapped treats. Byrne's obsession with capturing striking environmental details is perfectly matched with Ed Lachman's cinematography. Visually, TRUE STORIES evokes the shiny pre-fab face of Texas, where money from oil and microelectronics makes everything look new, as well as the dusty, weird Texas, a result of its funky ethnic mix. Yet, at least according to the film's distributor, it was framed for the 1.37:1 aspect ratio. Perfect for TV. Screening as part of the One and Done series. (1986, 90 min, 35mm) [Rob Christopher]

Howard Hawks' SCARFACE (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Monday, 7pm

Howard Hawks' early talkie SCARFACE finds him adapting Armitage Trail's nigh-unreadable novel of booze slinging and unbridled incestuous lust into a free-for-all of cinematic show-offery. The perversely mannered, highly symbolic cinematography and visual patterns Hawks brings to this dirty and unwholesome tale are justly famous: the fortuitous 'X' appearing within the mise-en-scene just as death approaches, the playful long-take of murder the opens the film that's been stolen out of Von Sternberg's UNDERWORLD, the tommy gun that blasts away the pages of a calendar to mark the days of Tony Camonte's mob rule. As Camonte, Paul Muni seems to move through the frame like a caged animal, infinitely furious and simultaneously perpetually calculating, a monster whose body exists only because his desires need physical form to be satisfied. Screening as part of the Proto-noir: The Roots of the Film Noir Movement series. (1932, 94 min, DCP Digital) [Kian Bergstrom]

Mario Bava's BLOOD AND BLACK LACE (Italy)

Comfort Film at Comfort Station – Wednesday, 8pm [Free Admission]

Mario Bava’s BLOOD AND BLACK LACE is the director’s second foray into giallo filmmaking, but its rippling influence can be seen later on in the works of Dario Argento (especially SUSPIRIA) and American slasher films of the 1980’s. A masked figure, dressed in black and looking like H.G. Wells’ Invisible Man, stalks and kills women of an Italian fashion house. After the police become involved, a notebook with incriminating evidence on all of the models surfaces amongst one of the victim’s belongings. Everyone remains a suspect in this whodunit, as alibis are examined and the body count continues to grow. Bava’s film is full of breathtaking imagery; an explosion of bright colors and ominous shadows paint the frames, providing ominous hiding places in which the killer could be hiding in every scene. Many sequences at the fashion house as well as at some of the characters’ homes feature standing mannequins, adding to the sense of foreboding. Bava’s extensive use of the color red not only reminds the viewer of the danger that is ever-present but also heightens the film’s themes of passion, jealousy, and violence. The film’s jazz lounge-esque score adds a smooth fluidity that compliments the onscreen actions. BLOOD AND BLACK LACE maintains a level of morbid intimacy as the murders are presented in close-up shots, with looks of terror on the victim’s face and unyielding hands used to perform the deed. It is a cornerstone of the entire giallo pantheon. (1964, 89 min, Digital Projection) [Kyle Cubr]

Barbara Loden's WANDA (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 4pm

Inspired by Jean-Luc Godard's BREATHLESS, the little-known, but very talented actress Barbara Loden wrote and directed her first and only film, WANDA, in 1970. Although she cast mostly nonprofessional actors for other roles, Loden herself stars as Wanda Goronski, a coal miner's wife who leaves her husband and children because she's "just no good." Put down as "Lover" and "Blondie" by other men she meets afterward, Wanda eventually takes up with a married bank robber (Michael Higgins) who tells her to call him Mr. Dennis, and they kill time on the road, running from the law through a landscape colored by distinctly American poverty. From a distance, the often expressionless, yet beautiful Wanda may appear like one of the lifeless mannequins that cinematographer Nicolas Proferes shoots in a department store; but Wanda is aware that she is a lost soul. Loden later described her partly autobiographical character: "She's trapped and she will never, ever get out of it and there are millions like her." Throughout this slow film of long takes, Wanda is always with some man or another, believing that she cannot take care of herself, that she is not a self. She finds herself in the hands of a criminal who only tolerates obedience, the same demand made of her by society. Loden's Wanda is both an impenetrable cipher and a fully embodied human being. She tells Mr. Dennis, "I don't have anything. Never did have anything, never will have anything." He bitterly responds, "That's stupid. You don't want anything, you won't have anything. You don't have anything, you're nothing. May as well be dead. You're not even a citizen of the United States." But while Wanda means nothing, it's not because she doesn't try. Society never gave her a chance. WANDA is a masterpiece of independent filmmaking that portrays what is rarely found onscreen—the true experience of a woman's life. Screening as part of the One and Done series. (1970, 102 min, DCP Digital) [Candace Wirt]

Jean Vigo's L'ATALANTE (France)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 2pm

There are movies that put you to sleep, and then there are movies that remind you that you are asleep: Jean Vigo's cryptically peerless L'ATALANTE, only somewhat recognizable as narrative cinema, sometimes seems as close a document as any of the inspired dreamlife of a modernizing Europe. Deliberately given an uninteresting screenplay by his producer, the literally feverish (he would die of Tuberculosis later that year) 28-year-old Jean Vigo orchestrated (and improvised) the playful and violent titular floating world (partially filmed on an actual barge in the Seine) which would magically transport its honeymooning, rural protagonist Juliette (Dita Parlo) into the strange crowds and technological chaos of Parisian urbanity. And in his legendary performance of the barge's old hand Jules, Swiss actor Michel Simon portrays the rage and kindness of the perpetually besotted with an empathy worthy of WITHNAIL AND I's Richard E. Grant. Meticulously restored in 1989 from Vigo's notes, the resultant ludic limbo—where the provincial certainty and simplicity of heterosexual kinship is perpetually thrown into doubt—will be either recognizable as The Way We Live Now, or as an explicitly political affront to the dozing apathy of cultural conservatism in all of its forms. Screening as part of the One and Done series. (1934, 89 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Castelle]

Jonathan Demme's STOP MAKING SENSE (US/Documentary)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

In nearly every shot, STOP MAKING SENSE makes the case that Jonathan Demme was the greatest director of musical performance in American cinema. It isn't difficult to convey the joy of making music, but Demme's attention to the interplay between musicians (and, in some inspired moments, between the musicians and their crew) conveys the imagination, hard work, and camaraderie behind any good song.  And, needless to say, the songs here are very, very good. By this point (the performances are culled from three concerts from 1983), Talking Heads were the headiest American band to achieve their degree of success, and they made the most of it, doubling their line-up to include back-up singers and a few instrumentalists from the golden years of George Clinton's Funkadelic. It's never openly acknowledged that the five new members are Black and the Heads are white; the sheer creativity of the music, which fuses everything from soul to traditional African rhythms to then-advanced electronic effects, is fully utopian in its spirit. (1984, 88 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

James Whale's THE INVISIBLE MAN (US)

Alamo Drafthouse (3519 N. Clark St., Suite C301) – Sunday, 2pm

James Whale's brilliant THE INVISIBLE MAN is as sexy and funny as it is nightmarish. Here, Whale continues his intricate exploration of the possibilities and implication of sync-sound horror by using the new technology to monstrously divide a man from his own voice.  Deprived of visibility, mad scientist Jack Griffin (in an almost wholly vocal performance by Claude Rains) determines to rule the world through the combined dual-threat of his newfound expertise at murder and his total nudity. Shedding his (visible) clothes, the naked Griffin stalks, shivering, through the snowy countryside, throttling and sabotaging his way through high-class British society, and it is often difficult to tell whether his violence or the easy palpability of his penis is more alarming to his potential victims, one of whom is the great Gloria Stuart. (1933, 71 min, DCP Digital) [Kian Bergstrom]

William Friedkin's SORCERER (US)

Alamo Drafthouse (3519 N. Clark St., Suite C301) – Sunday, 5:30pm

The usual saw about Friedkin's grimy big budget downer was that its underwhelming box office take brought the filmmaker's hot streak skidding to a halt. Period. Aside from that shallow by-the-numbers assessment, until recently few paid much attention to the film itself. Since Friedkin's digital restoration of his film last year, that's certainly changing. Some have even slapped the term "masterpiece" on it. But there's no need to over-praise a movie that as a whole somehow fails to gel. Because there are still many moments stunning in their beauty and sheer oddity. The truck meandering through a Jean Dubuffet-esque landscape. Howling wind and rain overlaid with Tangerine Dream's eerie score. And of course, the celebrated bridge crossing sequence, shamelessly ostentatious but unique and electrifying. Roy Scheider's face creases, filthy hands, and sheer weariness perfectly embody the film's mood of despair, one best experienced on a big screen. (1977, 121 min, DCP Digital) [Rob Christopher]

David Lynch's LOST HIGHWAY (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm

David Lynch loves to play in the dark. His longtime cinematographer Frederick Elmes once remarked that "with David, my job is to determine how dark we're talking about." There's sort-of-dark, and really-dark, and pitch-black-dark; all of these kinds and more are put to gripping use in LOST HIGHWAY. The most breathtaking example (perhaps echoing a shot from THRONE OF BLOOD) is a scene that takes place in a shadowy hallway. Avant-garde sax player and demi-protagonist Fred Madison slowly moves from lightness to dark, appearing to slowly dissolve before our very eyes. It's the sort of infinitely subtle visual moment that home video just can't adequately reproduce, and LOST HIGHWAY is packed with them. For too long this movie has been overshadowed by its more-celebrated follow-up, MULHOLLAND DR. But the fact is the two movies function as a true diptych, exploring similar themes of doubling and identity in ways that complement each other. To ignore LOST HIGHWAY is to discount some of Lynch's most indelible moments: including an unforgettably disquieting sex scene, the eerie Natalie Woodishness of a leather-clad Natasha Gregson Wagner, a gorgeous use of This Mortal Coil's "Song to the Siren," Richard Pryor's out-of-left-field cameo (it was his final film), and of course Robert Blake's unforgettable performance as the sinister Mystery Man. Screening as part of the Amour Fou series. (1997, 135 min, DCP Digital) [Rob Christopher]

John Carpenter's THE THING (US)

Alamo Drafthouse (3519 N. Clark St., Suite C301) – Saturday, 10pm

John Carpenter has always been a minimalist when it comes to framing, using his preferred format of widescreen to create a pronounced sense of negative space and, with it, a pronounced sense of dread. Similarly, he tends to sculpt performances that are understated and direct, much as they are in the work of his favorite director, Howard Hawks. THE THING is a remake of Hawks’ foray into sci-fi horror, THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD (1951), and one can sense Carpenter’s reverence for the original in his Hawksian depiction of the professional community that makes up the principal characters. Yet where Hawks’ film was a portrait of heroism, showing how a group of scientists bands together to fight off a hostile extraterrestrial life form, Carpenter’s is a pessimistic work that shows a community coming apart in the midst of an alien invasion. (It’s widely suspected that the film was a commercial flop on first release because it came out only a few months after E.T. THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL, which presented a much rosier view of human-alien relations; Carpenter’s pessimism just wasn’t welcome at the time.) That breakdown is presented in exquisite, gory detail: Rob Bottin’s special make-up effects are some of the most lauded of their kind in movie history, depicting people and animals as they mutate into hideous half-alien creatures. This was Carpenter’s first major studio film, and he took full advantage of the resources available to him. In addition to the first-rate effects, THE THING features a brilliant mix of studio sets and location shooting (with British Columbia standing in for Antarctica) and an appropriately chilling Ennio Morricone score. (1982, 109 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

John Carney’s FLORA AND SON (US)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

Of all of our actively working film directors in the 21st century, surely no one believes in the communal power of music more than John Carney. The Irish writer-director has spent the better part of the past fifteen years telling cinematic fables about how music and songwriting can bring us together, going all the way back to his Academy Award-winning breakthrough ONCE (2007). There are faint echoes of that early hit reverberating through Carney’s latest, FLORA AND SON, a film that consistently hits chords he’s insistent on playing anytime he makes a feature. Here, outside the thrown-together long-distance love story hiding in the B-plot featuring internet guitar teacher Jeff (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the real story of connection is between the eponymous pair: single mother Flora (Eve Hewson) and her teenage son Max (Orén Kinlan). From the moment the childish antagonistic relationship between mother and son pops up on screen, chances are you’ll be able to guess, beat by beat, how the rest of the film will follow. And you likely won’t be wrong! Flora picks up playing guitar as a new hobby and finds out that Max is making his own electronic music in secret on GarageBand. Their shared interest grows stronger over time, with the pair crafting songs, filming music videos, and finally finding a true bond as parent and child for the first time in their lives. And while there are some inevitable bumps in the road, there’s no denying that this will all end in a charming song that binds our characters together before the credits roll. Carney reunites with his SING STREET (2016) songwriter Gary Clark to whip up a handful of tunes; they don’t reach the heights of Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová’s ONCE ballads, or even the tunefulness of SING STREET’s rocking “Drive It Like You Stole It,” but charming duets like “Meet Me in the Middle” and “High Life” could easily worm their way into your Spotify Wrapped by year’s end if you’re not too careful. (2023, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
ALSO SCREENING

 ⚫ Asian Pop-Up Cinema
The extensive and inimitable Asian Pop-Up Cinema series continues its seventeenth season. Their in-person and virtual offerings are too many to list; visit here for more information.

⚫ Chicago Film Archives
The Chicago Transit Authority, in partnership with the Chicago Film Archives (CFA), presents a new, one-of-a-kind temporary art installation now playing at the Cicero Green Line station (4800 W. Lake St.). The installation, called we love, is a filmic exhibition of home movies and amateur films selected from collections housed and preserved at CFA. The video, which has a runtime of approximately 48 minutes, will be projected onto a wall in the mezzanine area of the station. The video will run day and night through mid-March next year. More info here.  

⚫ Chicago Jobs with Justice Labor Film Series
Felipe Bustos Sierra’s 2018 documentary NAE PASARÁN (96 min, Digital Projection) screens Thursday, 6pm, at UIC School of Public Health (1603 W. Taylor St.). Followed by a post-screening discussion; pizza, popcorn, and refreshments will be available. Free admission. Learn more and register here. 

⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Héctor Babenco’s 1980 film PIXOTE (128 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday, 6:30pm, as part of the Open Veins: Postcolonial Cinema of the Luso-Hispanic World series.

John Huston’s 1979 film WISE BLOOD (106 min, Digital Projection) screens Tuesday, 7pm, as part of the False Preachers series. 

Danny Boyle’s 1996 film TRAINSPOTTING (93 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday, 7pm, as part of the In the Club: 90s Electronic Music and Beyond series.

Frank Henenlotter’s 1982 film BASKET CASE (91 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday, 9:30pm, as part of the Depths of the Grindhouse series. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ FACETS Cinema
Screening as part of the Migrant Stories in Italian Cinema series are Roberto De Paolis’ 2022 film PRINCESS (108 min, Digital Projection) on Friday at 7pm; Laura Luchetti’s 2018 film FIORE GEMELLO (95 min, Digital Projection) on Saturday at 1pm; Matteo Calore, Stefano Collizzolli and Andrea Segre’s 2023 film TRIESTE È BELLA DI NOTTE (75 min, Digital Projection) on Saturday at 3pm; Phaim Bhuiyan’s 2019 film BANGLA (84 min, Digital Projection) on Sunday at 3pm; and Carlo Mazzacurati’s 2007 film LA GIUSTA DISTANZA (106 min, Digital Projection) on Sunday at 5pm. Presented by the Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago in collaboration with FACETS.

Mental Filmness presents Alex Heller’s 2022 film THE YEAR BETWEEN (94 min, Digital Projection), preceded by a program of Chicago student shorts with filmmakers in attendance, on Saturday starting at 7pm. 

The premiere of the short film KEYS screens Monday at 4pm. 

The FACETS Anime Club presents a members only night with a double feature of Yoshiaki Kawajiri's 2000 film VAMPIRE HUNTER D: BLOODLUST (105 min, Digital Projection) at 7pm and Hiroyuki Kitakubo’s 2000 film BLOOD: THE LAST VAMPIRE (48 min, Digital Projection)) at 9pm. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
David Bickerstaff’s 2023 documentary VERMEER – THE GREATEST EXHIBITION (90 min, DCP Digital) begins and the new 30th anniversary 4K digital restoration of Chen Kaige’s 1993 Chinese film FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE (170 min, DCP Digital) continues. See Venue website for showtimes.

Also screening as part of the One and Done series are Leslie Harris’ 1993 independent film JUST ANOTHER GIRL ON THE I.R.T. (92 min, DCP Digital) on Saturday at 3pm and Saul Bass’ 1974 film PHASE IV (84 min, DCP Digital) on Saturday at 6pm. 

Set Hernandez Rongkilyo’s 2023 documentary UNSEEN (88 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday at 4pm and Monday at 6pm. Presented with open captions; followed by a CART-captioned post-screening discussion with director Rongkilyo.

Daniel Eisenberg’s 1987 documentary PERSISTENCE (86 min, Digital Projection) screens Tuesday, 6pm, as part of Eisenberg’s fall SAIC lecture series, the Times, the Chronicle, the Witness, and the Observer: Three Decades Of Film/Video Inquiry. 

Lawrence Andrews’ 2019 genre-defying imageless video mythicPotentialities screens Thursday, 6pm, as part of Conversations at the Edge. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Klaus Härö’s 2023 Irish film MY SAILOR, MY LOVE (103 min, DCP Digital) and The Cramps and the Mutants: The Napa State Tapes (72 min, DCP Digital) begin screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes. 

Tracy Droz Tragos’s 2023 documentary PLAN C (94 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday at 4:15pm, followed by a post-film Q&A with Plan C co-founder Francine Coeytaux moderated by Nadine Peacock. 

The Black & Brown Femme Films shorts programs screens Saturday at 4:30pm. Programmed and presented by BFF Entertinament. 

Also screening as part of the Bride of Music Box of Horrors month-long series are Stephen Susco’s 2018 film UNFRIENDED: DARK WEB (92 min, DCP Digital) on Saturday at 11:30pm, hosted by Oscarbate and with Susco in attendance for a post-screening Q&A; Alan Parker’s 1987 film ANGEL HEART (113 min, 35mm) screens Monday at 9:15pm, co-presented by the Satanic Temple Illinois; and Ronny Yu’s 1998 film BRIDE OF CHUCKY (89 min, 35mm) on Thursday at 9:45pm, presented by Rated Q and Ramona Slick - A Celebration of Queer, Camp, & Cult Cinema with a pre-show drag performance. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Sideshow Gelato (4819 N. Western Ave.)
The Sideshow Gelato shop presents Sideshow Sinema!, during which they will screen films connected to the shop theme, every Thursday. More info here.

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

🎞️ ONLINE SCREENINGS/EVENTS

⚫ VDB TV
The shorts program Germán Bobe: Dreaming in the Gardens of Love (1988 - 1991, 28 min) screens for free on VDB TV. More info here.

CINE-LIST: October 6 - October 12, 2023

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Kian Bergstrom, Michael Castelle, Rob Christopher, Maxwell Courtright, Kyle Cubr, Alex Ensign, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Ben Kaye, Raphael Jose Martinez, Harrison Sherrod, Michael Glover Smith, Candace Wirt