"Wanda" (1970)

Nitrate film, which movies used to be exhibited on, was flammable, explosive, prone to rot, unstable. 35mm celluloid as we still know it today is one of the most stable of preservation media. Yet the film industry is rapidly shifting to digital formats, much to its likely sooner-than-later regrets. Are you old enough to have a few three-and-a-half-inch floppies on a shelf in the closet? Eight-inch Wang floppies? Take just the quickest moment to think of how you might go about recovering the data and you’ve got an idea of what the film industry will face in coming years. Read the rest of this entry »

Ray Lambert and John Davies

Twenty years ago, John Davies got his first job as a producer working on Siskel and Ebert’s “Sneak Previews.” This month, his documentary “Phunny Business” will premiere at the Gene Siskel Film Center, a fitting return to the Chicago film scene.

The documentary focuses on All Jokes Aside, a South Loop comedy club that helped launch the careers of celebrities like Jamie Foxx and Chris Rock. Davies first encountered the club when he visited Chicago to run a charity event at the venue and was invited to see the normal show by owner Raymond Lambert. “What I saw that night stuck with me,” he says. “It was a really interesting club doing a different kind of comedy.” Read the rest of this entry »

Catie Olson has always had a fascination with short films. She says they’re a bit like a one-liner. A quick, sometimes simple setup that, if done correctly, can have an enormous response. The 38-year-old artist says she watched several short-film festivals and screenings come and go in her sixteen years in Chicago before she began to consider doing one on her own.

In 2007, along with her husband, Erik Brown, Olson launched Spiderbug, a mobile festival that’s a mash-up of music and visual art drawn from a broader theme she provides. In the past, Spiderbug has called for filmmakers to submit their worst short film, or create one around the idea of pH  (yes, as in the measurement of acidity in a liquid). A bit of a vague task, Olson admits, but it’s part of the fun.

“I really wanted to create a unique experience, something that went a little further beyond a normal film screening,” she says. Read the rest of this entry »

Sean Benjamin and Steven Mosqueda, like many Americans, love indulgence. The two members of the Neo Futurists theater collective have been letting  their cups run over since 2002 with their passion project Drinking and Writing Theater, exploring the connection between creativity and alcohol.

Enter the Tied House Film Festival. The two are teaming up with Chicago Filmmakers on June 3 and 4 to present a series of short films exploring the  five stages of intoxication: euphoria, excitement, confusion, stupor and coma. Inspired by the tied house pubs of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Chicago, the festival is devoted entirely to short films by local filmmakers.

Having developed live shows and opined on film, theater and craft beer on their radio show, Benjamin and Mosqueda began looking for a new way to further bring together their passions for craft beer and performance art. In 2010 the two were putting together a documentary and came up with the admittedly overzealous idea of a weeklong festival based entirely on drinking and writing. After getting in contact with Chicago Filmmakers, they settled on a two-day fest of shorts combining beer. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

I spent most of last week in the dark in Toronto, not thinking about Toronto.

Almost every crisp, aromatic spring day, whether misty or sun-bright, I burrowed into the dark, seeing as many films as possible at the nineteenth edition of North America’s largest documentary festival, trying not to think about the city outside or the numbers piling up around me: 200 filmmakers, 360 public screenings of 199 films on sixteen screens in locations stretching across Toronto, plus workshops, panels, conferences, conversations. A final attendance estimate of over 150,000, eleven percent higher than 2010.

The festival’s combination of industry networking and co-financing meetings and sheer good-willed hopefulness has always struck me: a perfect storm of art and ambition and productivity from the privileged perspective of a journalist who gets to see both sides of the event. While some panels are open to the public in venues around town, the fact that 168 of those screenings sold out after going to rush ticketing shows a local appetite for the programmers’ slate of local and international nonfiction. Read the rest of this entry »

"Space, Land and Time: Underground Adventuers With Ant Farm"

RECOMMENDED

Fourteen programs of features and shorts about design around the world comprise The Architecture & Design Film Festival, which looks to be a solid, diverse bunch. Wendy Keys’ “Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight” played Chicago last year, and its portrait of the articulate, archetypal New Yorker never fails to, well, inform and delight, as the title epigraph from Horace has it. The subversive 1970s architecture collective Ant Farm is represented in “Space, Land and Time: Underground Adventures With Ant Farm”; their stunts and exploits could likely fill a feature longer than the seventy-eight minutes here. There’s a rich portrait of Canadian architect Phyllis Bronfman Lambert in the film “Citizen Lambert: Joan of Architecture,” a complex woman from a powerful Canadian family, known for her chilliness yet for visionary zeal. I found Kaspar Astrup Schröder’s fifty-minute “My Playground” to be an unexpected thrill, combining the intellectualizing of young architects in Copenhagen about urban space with Parkour and Freerunning practitioners bouncing off the city’s walls and roofs with the open encouragement of its government. The combination of the feats of the human body with a luscious soundtrack are a stellar combination. A four-minute video from the film, is below. “My Playground” made me as happy as any documentary I’ve seen this year. It has passages that are simply magic. I love it. (Ray Pride)

The Architecture & Design Film Festival runs May 5-9 at Siskel and The Wit. Complete film listings are at adfilmfest.com

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"Aerosol D'Amour"

When Whole Foods arrived in the South Loop to satisfy the neighborhood’s craving for organic almond milk and chocolate-covered goji berries, few would have guessed the branch would help nourish the filmgoing masses as well. But last year it organized the first annual South Loop Film Festival at the brand new ShowPlace ICON Theatre, featuring shorts by national and local filmmakers. This year’s incarnation features some twenty films, all under ten minutes, representing some of the latest work by independent Midwestern and Chicago filmmakers.

The movies run the gamut from documentaries, music videos and trailers to experimental projects. Highlights include Amanda Daniels’ comedy “Aerosol D’Amour,” which screened at the Columbus International Film Festival; Josh Hope’s drama “The Singer”; and Nelson Carvajal’s web doc, “Skate Park.” The 100-minute program will conclude with a Q&A with some of the filmmakers and audience awards. In addition, Julia Thomas, Community Relations Specialist for Whole Foods South Loop, says to expect a “big swag bag of goodies” after the screening. Read the rest of this entry »

"Vanishing of the Bees"

Rounding off Earth Month, Whole Foods Market and the Gene Siskel Film Center team up for the Do Something Reel Festival, a weeklong series of documentaries spotlighting health and environmental issues with an emphasis on food topics. The festival has been touring the country since April 1, making an appearance in seventy cities.

While the festival’s mission might imply a penchant for dry, “message” movies, the six independently produced films on offer don’t stint on storytelling. Highlights include “Vanishing of the Bees,” a 2009 doc narrated by Ellen Page about “Colony Collapse Disorder” that follows commercial beekeepers as they struggle to save their colonies; “Lunch Line,” which follows the contentious history of America’s School Lunch Program, weaving in the story of six kids from Chicago’s Tilden Academy; and “On Coal River,” a documentary in the vein of Barbara Kopple’s “Harlan County, USA” about a community’s fight for environmental protection in West Virginia’s heavily mined Coal River Valley. The series will conclude with a panel discussion with some of the filmmakers and activists.

The festival itself does not mark the end of WFM’s interest in environment-themed filmmaking. A portion of the ticket sales will go towards a film-production-and-development grant designed to “encourage more storytelling about the environment and the choices we make as consumers and business people,” according to Crowdstarter’s Jessica Wolfson. (Benjamin Rossi)

Do Something Reel Festival runs from April 22 to April 28 at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 North State. For more information, go to http://www.siskelfilmcenter.org

The third edition of CIMM boasts seventeen venues with seventy films and ten concerts in four days this weekend, and the range of attractions promised, from experimental work to music bio-docs looks extremely strong. One feature I previewed, Lev Anderson and Chris Metzler’s “Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone,” narrated by Laurence Fishburne, is a model of how to tell the tale of a powerful punk-funk band’s rough road in a twenty-five year career. The power of musical and political conviction carries the day. Musicians in various lineups include Tim Rutili and Gillian Lisee as well as legendary Chicago art-punks Tutu & The Pirates. I’m most excited to witness Sam Green (“The Weather Underground”) and Dave Cerf’s “live documentary,” “Utopia in Four Movements,” a look back at the twentieth century that encapsulates the possibility of utopian ideals in the twenty-first. Debuted to acclaim at Sundance 2011, Green narrates a visual barrage of stills and moving images, while Cerf does live sound from samples and loops, while The Quavers, fine soundtrack composers, play a live score. No two performances are the same. Without having seen the live version, I’ll leave it to the words of documentary collagist Adam Curtis: A “brilliantly witty, but also moving meditation on our loss of faith in the dream of progress. Sam has created something completely original—a new form of live story-telling that draws you in emotionally in a way that traditional documentaries almost always fail to do.” There’s a promise to deliver on. Full schedule at cimmfest.org. (Ray Pride)