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The highlights of the second week of the Siskel Film Center’s marvelous March EU Film Festival include “Let It Rain,” (Fri, Mon) the latest from the writing-acting-directing team of Agnes Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri (whose credits include writing for Alain Resnais and the splendid “The Taste of Others” and “Look at Me”). It’s a comedic ensemble piece about a famous feminist writer who decides to run for office. Catherine Breillat’s latest bent-gender tale, “Bluebeard” (Sat, Thu) is another entry featured from France this week. Spain’s “Cell 211,” a prison drama that swept that country’s Goya Awards, plays Saturday and Thursday. The sweetly sweeping gem of the week, however, is from Italy, Luca Guadagnino’s “I Am Love,” (Io sono l’amore), with Tilda Swinton (acting in Italian) at the center of generational rumbles in a wealthy Milan family. Mad, fabulous melodrama ensues, accompanied by a fine, first score by composer John Adams. Guadagnino is an inspired director of all kinds of rhapsodic moments, and his passion extends to a feast of food imagery. (Ray Pride)

The 13th Annual European Union Film Festival continues through March at Siskel.

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The 13th Annual European Union Film Festival occupies most of the month of March at the Siskel Film Center, which notes that it’s the largest showcase in North America for cinema from the EU. Fifty-nine Chicago feature premieres, from all twenty-seven EU nations: that’s a lot. The past couple of years, it’s been a refrain of mine, which bears repeating: it may be the best film festival in Chicago in terms of curatorial focus, concentrated scale, quality of attractions and ease of attendance, all in two of the best theaters in the city. Some of the movies are set for release, but it may be the only chance anytime soon to see the bulk of them. Spain currently holds the presidency of the European Union, so the fest opens with Fernando Trueba’s “The Dancer and the Thief,” that country’s Academy Award submission, and the first narrative feature from the director of “Belle Époque” in eight years. The big winner at Spain’s Goya Awards, “Cell 211,” a hit prison thriller, also plays this week. Other attractions: a preview of Niels Arden Oplev’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” (pictured) a 152-minute Swedish adaptation of the first of Stieg Larsson’s worldwide bestselling “Millennium Trilogy,” well-reviewed in its Scandinavian release, which Music Box Films will release nationwide in the coming weeks (with the two other adaptations coming late this summer).  From Italy, there’s “Mid-August Lunch,” a comedy of manners in old age, produced by the director of “Gomorrah” and directed by one of its co-writers. (It opens at the Music Box in April.) There’s also the latest from writer-director Neil Jordan, “Ondine,”‘ which matches a mermaid and Colin Farrell. All three are captivating characteristics, at least from reports from Toronto 2009. Previews of other features will appear in coming weeks. (Ray Pride)

The full schedule is at the Siskel website.

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Fabrice O. Joubert’s “French Roast” (France, 8m) satirizes café life in Paris with the story of a businessman’s lost wallet and a second cup of coffee. Joubert’s beautifully dimensional CG animated world suggests the live-action work of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, but the timing and crisply comic sound design bear worthy comparison to Tati. Nicky Phelan’s “Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty” (Ireland, 6m) finds a disoriented grandmother making “Sleeping Beauty” into nightmare material for her granddaughter. Lovingly paced with the comedy enhanced by the rolling Irish accents. Javier Recio Gracia’s “The Lady and The Reaper” (Spain, 8m) follows another nice old woman, this one awaiting the Grim Reaper with complications to come late one night. The use of space and light suggests the dourness of Shane Acker’s “9″ but bursts into speed and color and gaudy 3-D animation as the story kicks in. Nick Park’s latest Wallace & Gromit, “A Matter of Loaf and Death” (30m, UK) returns to the handmade style that Park’s fans remember best. The dashing duo have opening a successful bakery, “Top Bun,” at 62 West Wallaby Street, but the murders of other bakers leads to a murder mystery. The clockwork comic inspiration is largely inspired. Read the rest of this entry »

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One of the more intriguing developments in the “democratization” of filmmaking with inexpensive video equipment and modest budgets is the development of an unexpected new form of star system. Specialized videos on motorcycles, guns and fishing have been bubbling under for more than a decade, sold and traded among the aficionados of the most specialized objects imaginable. (I’d never heard of most of the fish in a raft of successful fishing videos made around the world by an uncle of mine in the nineties.) With “Helvetica” and “Objectified,” Gary Hustwit’s made a fine line in successful self-distribution to designers worldwide, capturing process, but also the faces behind the work that inspire this small yet substantial potential audience. (“Floored,” which premiered at Siskel this month, may find similar trade among present and former members of the financial industry around the planet.) Just like they say in the magazines, the stars? They’re just like you and me. “It becomes obsolete, which is what makes it valuable,” someone observes under the opening titles of “Typeface,” capturing the enterprise both of the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, as well as Justine Nagan’s documentary, a Kartemquin Films production.  Nagan’s “Typeface” has a tactile character that’s unexpected. It’s awe-inspiring enough to see racks and racks and racks of beautiful, aged, oiled, dated wood type, but Nagan observes; the museum’s director flicks on circuit breakers as the day begins: thwock-thwock-thwock. It’s a fine example of how the past isn’t past. Best, it doesn’t feel nostalgic, but appreciative of history, its weight and its wonder. “It’s wood. How can you not like wood, right?” 58m. DigiBeta. Shown with Kartemquin’s short about the Chicago Chicano mural movement of the 1970s, “Viva La Causa.” 16mm. (Ray Pride)

“Typeface” opens Friday at Siskel. Nagan appears at Friday’s screening.

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Theme and topic can be familiar yet the filmmaking splendid and new, as it is in the case of Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Silva’s “The Maid” (La nana). Shot in the Santiago home where he grew up, Silva’s black comic telling of a 41-year-old maid, Raquel (Catalina Saavedra) whose twenty-three years of service had led her to feel a part of the family is fiendishly intimate. There’s a tincture of Buñuel in this portrait of servitude and confused affinities. The home, and especially the kitchen, is Raquel’s castle but prison as well. Richly imagined in its jittery mood even if its visual palette is unassumingly low-fi, “The Maid” doesn’t stereotype the upstairs or downstairs of the economically engendered relationship, but earns an apt conclusion after Rachel befriends a new servant. Saavedra’s rich, often ambiguous performance is a treasure. A Sundance jury prizewinner. Saavedra won the IFP Gotham Awards’ Breakthrough Actor prize on Monday night. 94m.  (Ray Pride)

“The Maid” opens Friday at the Music Box.

A high art cry has gone up from film festivals this year from Cannes to last weeks’ Fantastic Fest in Austin: “Chaos reigns!” It’s a confrontational burst from a fox in the woods in Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist,” [pictured] taking a moment from gnawing itself to bloodiness. Weird and also weirdly prescient about the economics of film and film festivals, Von Trier’s misanthropic performance piece yields at least that variation on William Goldman’s timeless observation about filmmaking, “Nobody knows anything.” In its forty-fifth manifestation, the Chicago International Film Festival is located under a single roof in Streeterville, at River East, and while film distributors are slimming and ways for smaller and foreign language movies to find audiences are in question, there’s still a world of film to explore. Some have distribution via ambitious companies like IFC, Sony Pictures Classics and Magnolia and will be in theaters soon; others may be harder to find in months to come. Picks from the festival’s opening week: “Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl” is likely tidy, a short feature about desire and obsession from 100-year-old Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, who’s begun another feature since. One of the untidiest movies I’ve seen this year is “Cooking History,” an intense documentary about the battlefield cooks of twentieth-century European War. A tasty collection of characters, indeed: an army travels on its scuttlebutt. Read the rest of this entry »

Film festivals are retrenching around the world as economies contract and sponsorships dwindle. The Chicago Underground Film Festival’s 2008 edition ran in late October, just as the financial crisis began, at a venue that was difficult to get to by public transportation, during an Indian summer heat wave, opening on the closing night of Chicago International, which also was the night of Barack Obama’s primetime infomercial, just a week before the election. The results were disappointing. But a move to September this year, at the Loop-located Siskel Film Center promises better things. Festival director Bryan Wendorf is optimistic. “The economy didn’t really impact the number of films submitted. The quality, as always, ran the gamut from awful to brilliant but there was plenty to look at and choose from.”

Trends emerge during programming. “I never look to program around a predetermined theme, but once the films and videos are chosen patterns emerge,” Wendorf says. “This year there seems to be a lot of work dealing with ideas about place, home and globalization. Some of the work, like Lucy Raven’s experimental documentary ‘China Town’ deals with this in a very conscious and direct way while other works address these issues from more oblique angles.” Another trend is for work on digital video to exploit its own textures rather than pretending it’s the same as film. “Video is almost infinitely malleable. But the festival has never set out to be a ‘new media’ showcase and we are still seeing great work on 16mm and 35mm.”

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A modest crowd filters into the Hoover-Leppen Theater at the Center on Halsted. A number of patrons talk with friends while others casually glance behind them to see if they recognize anyone they know. The crowd settles down as Gay Chicago’s film critic Charlie Shoquist takes the stage to introduce his pick for the Queer Film 101 series. The month-long event allows film critics from The Windy City Times, Gay Chicago, Chicago Free Press and TimeOut Chicago to showcase films that have impacted the GLBT community. The series gives viewers “the ability to talk with film critics and have a discussion afterwards,” says Danny Kopelson, the Center’s Director of Communications and Public Affairs. Read the rest of this entry »

Northwestern University’s venue Block Cinema will host the Talking Pictures Festival, Evanston’s first-ever film festival, during the first week of May, curated by Ines Sommer and Kathy Berger of Percolator Films’ Reel Time series. “Kathy Berger and I have been running this Reel Time series in Evanston for a long time,” Sommer says. “It’s a monthly film and discussion series, mostly about documentaries. For the festival it will be a whole range of films from animation to fiction and international films and locally produced stuff. It’s a wider range in terms of audiences and there will be programs that might even be OK for kids to check out.” In association with Percolator, Sommer and Berger have reached out to a number of Evanston organizations in order to get the festival up on its feet and have managed to get a good number of films showcased. “We have fifteen programmed slots because there are a number of short film programs; right now we have about three slots that are short film programs and a couple slots that are longer films combined with the shorter films.”

By Ray Pride

Come to think of it, every frame of every film asks, “What is cinema?” Some frames scream, others mutter, some stumble in literal and figurative darkness. Then there are filmmakers like Carlos Reygadas, whose stubborn, implacable, sublime spiritual tale “Silent Light” has emerged from distribution backwaters to limited theatrical exhibition (it opened Friday at Facets). I’m happily surprised it’s finally playing here.

Last week, I observed a masterclass at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival by Vilmos Zsigmond, whose philosophy as cinematographer boils down to storytelling as lighting, as seen in paintings and stills. Composition, he confidently stated, is secondary, since there is only ever one proper place to put the camera. Read the rest of this entry »