For those looking for something to reconcile a love of underground film and architectural history, Saturday’s Backyard Film & Music Festival has a solution. Now in its third year, the expanding festival has moved camp south to the Pullman State Historic Site, at the heart of the landmark company town famous for railroad car manufacturing and the 1894 Pullman Strike.  The shorts cover a wide range of approaches to filmmaking (documentary, feature, music video, animation, experimental) as well as production values. “BFMF started as a way to showcase work by people maybe just starting out, who maybe haven’t seen their work projected on a screen,” says festival spokesman Fred Koschmann. “But that’s not an absolute… there’s some very professional work as well.” This year’s festival will also be the first to feature live music, with acts like Dosh, Light Pollution and Nathan Blake Lynn performing. (Todd Hieggelke)

July 24, Noon, $15, bfmf2010.com

"Un Prophete"

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Even with the promise of the highest of high-quality a/c, film programming in the dead of summer is an iffy thing: one beautiful day and a theater has no lovely audience. While the Siskel Film Center has experimented with additions to its repertory, with shorter runs, and promoting subruns of less-well-attended art-house movies like Jane Campion’s “Bright Star” or Roman Polanski’s “The Ghost Writer” for 35mm runs before their arrival on video, this July offers two endearingly ambitious, non-first-run programs. “Vive les Auteurs,” pairs recent releases by French directors with earlier work that also deserves a look-see on the big screen with grand sound. The great André Téchiné’s lovely “The Girl On The Train,” with an ambiguous turn by Emilie Dequenne in the title role, returns (Sun-Mon, Wed), paired with “The Witnesses,” his 2007 ensemble piece that brings the best out of Michel Blanc and Emmanuelle Beart (Fri, Sun, Thu). Next week, Jacques Audiard’s Oscar-nominated “Un Prophete,” a snaky, magisterial prison saga is teamed with his earlier “Read My Lips” (2001), an uncommonly tactile mystery set amid office politics. Laurent Cantet and Catherine Breillat are featured later in the month. The conceit of “Tarantino & Co.” is to pair that director’s work with movies that influenced him; among the attractions this month (then running through the end of August) from QT’s pen and sword, “Grindhouse,” “True Romance” and the two “Kill Bill”s back-to-back. Howard Hawks’ “Rio Bravo” is also on tap, and in early August, the unlikely “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.” A keen way of cutting costs, but also beating the attractions at the multiplex. (Ray Pride)

Full calendar at the Siskel site.

Pickup trucks that weave through alleys and whose beds are filled with old piping, appliances whose days are behind them, any other metals for the taking can be seen throughout Chicago. Filmmakers Ben Kolak, Brian Ashby and Courtney Prokopas immersed themselves in this culture of metal scavenging, and from their time amidst the scraps and the people who search for it, salvaged a distinctly Chicago story.

“Scrappers” will make its world premiere at the Gene Siskel Film Center on June 27 at 4:45pm as part of the seventeenth annual Chicago Underground Film Festival. “Since this was a longitudinal study and we knew we needed to gain a lot of information, we spent six months in the scrap yard talking to people,” says Kolak. The filmmakers, whose first inclination to make a film about scrappers came from seeing the trucks in Hyde Park alleys while at the U of C, then spent another two years filming scavengers, their finds and the sales they made.

The film focuses on two Chicago scrappers—Oscar, an undocmented immigrant from Honduras, and Otis, a South Side native who’s been selling scrap metal for decades. “Our subjects are both family men,” says Ashby, “and what we encountered were not thieves as they’re often portrayed, but honest guys who couldn’t find work or didn’t have papers.” The filmmakers find that the business is as diverse as any, from a scrapper collecting cans in a shopping cart to an operator with dozens of employees who buys scrap from large industrial companies and resells it in large amounts. Oscar and Otis reside somewhere in the middle, clearly good at what they do but dealing with an array of economic, political and family issues. Read the rest of this entry »

A Letter to Uncle Boonmee

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Experimental filmmaking lives and thrives. Here are highlights of the opening night of the 22nd Onion City festival. School of the Art Institute alum Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” began that project with the short, “A Letter to Uncle Boonmee,” an atmospheric piece set in a small Thai jungle village.  Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby’s found-footage-animation hybrid, “Beauty Plus Pity,” makes witty play of hunters-vs.-animals and ends with an animated musical number by animal “gods.” Janie Geiser’s “Ghost Algebra” is lovingly treated animation about a woman’s mysterious voyage. Daïchi Saïto’s “Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis” is hand-processed 35mm film of a forest scene, scored by violinist Malcolm Goldstein. The flicker of its color variations is enhanced by the bold, sawing score. Sharon Lockhart’s “Podwórka” is a gorgeous portrait of the battered courtyards between apartment buildings in Lodz, Poland. Children play, dogs sniff, the sounds of the city are more distant than birdsong. Striking compositions and rich color add to the hypnotic effect. Jia Zhang-ke’s gentle “Cry Me a River” is as elusive as his recent features, as a quartet of thirtysomething former students meet to celebrate a professor’s birthday. Their exchange of memories since their parting is, in the director’s words, his attempt to  “see if I could tell a story that spanned ten years in fifteen or twenty minutes.” Visually beautiful and emotionally tender, comparisons to Ozu and Hou Hsiao-Hsien are instructive but do not convey its delicate, memorable fragrance. (There’s even a joke about Hou’s muse, the actress Shu Qi.) Program 105m. (Ray Pride)

This opening night program plays Thursday, June 17, 8pm. The festival continues at Chicago Filmmakers through next weekend.

By Andrew Rhoades

Structures towering hundreds of feet in the air with steel blades moving at upwards of 150 miles-per-hour, killing unsuspecting bats and throwing sheets of ice in different directions, cast flickering shadows all around them. Anchored deep in concrete beds, the structures’ sound is felt across the plains like the reverberations of a bass drum, rumbling ceaselessly.

This is the song of the wind turbine. Unrecognizable from its windmill ancestors on picturesque farms, these modern giants can be a nightmare for inhabitants of the nearby farmhouses they dwarf. Filmmaker Laura Israel first caught wind of the true nature of modern wind turbines in a small town in upstate New York where she would go to decompress from the rigors of city life. “I started reading things in the paper about wind farms and began talking to people who seemed to all have a strong ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer on these wind turbines, and I realized there’s more to this story than I thought,” Israel says. Read the rest of this entry »

Moloch Tropical

This weekend, the “Haiti on Screen” film series will conclude at Northwestern’s Block Cinema in Evanston with five films screening between Friday and Saturday. The series, organized by Doris Garraway and Christiane Rey of Northwestern’s Department of French and Italian, seeks to show the complexities of Haitian life, past and present, in light of January’s devastating earthquake and media coverage of it. “Part of the impetus for using cinema was to counteract the images the media used to portray Haitians as helpless victims,” says Garraway. The selected films instead show Haitians as agents of culture—political actors, artists and groups resisting marginalization. Garraway says that the organizers wanted films that covered a range of topics including, history, art, globalization and relations with the U.S. in an effort to “bring forward a view of contemporary Haiti.” The films will represent “the diversity of Haiti and show the viewers the complexities and richness of Haitian art, culture, and religion…[as] a thoughtful response to the images of Haitians as only dying victims,” Garraway says. On Friday April 30 at 7pm, “Moloch Tropical” by renowned filmmaker Raoul Peck will make its Chicago premiere. The 2009 film depicts a fictional Haitian president amid very real political strife. It was filmed at an eighteenth-century fortress in the north of Haiti, which Garraway says gives viewers a sense of Haiti’s geography and cultural history. All screenings are free and will be followed Saturday by a roundtable discussion featuring activists and academics each with particular expertise on an aspect of Haitian culture. (Andrew Rhoades)

"American Radical"

In its nine years, the Chicago Palestine Film Festival, now underway at the Gene Siskel Film Center, has had to navigate its share of controversies, given the fragile state of affairs in its homeland. Peter Farah, a Palestinian native, became an organizing committee member for the festival when he moved to Chicago five years ago. “A lot of people are reluctant to say they don’t understand much about Palestine…[the film festival] is a noncontroversial and noncombative way to educate people and entertain them,” Farah says. On Aprl 24 at 5pm, the festival will screen “American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein,” a film with a particular Chicago connection. Finkelstein, the son of two Holocaust survivors, has been at the center of many academic and political controversies over his criticism of Israel and U.S. Middle East policy, including his denied tenure by DePaul University in 2007. “We have films that obviously some people aren’t going to like,” says Farah, “but we look at our selections as to the value of the film rather than whether or not it may offend people.” A series of short films by children ages 10-16, “Voices Beyond Walls: Youth Visions of Jerusalem,” will screen on April 25 at 3pm. Farah says the committee chose these films to try to help younger viewers to learn about life in Palestine: “It’s a powerful venue: film and new technologies can empower people to have their voices heard.” The festival runs until April 29. (Andrew Rhoades)

“When we began, barely 500 people showed up to see the films,” says Pepe Vargas, director of the Chicago Latino Film Festival. “Now it’s gotten to the point where it’s more than 30,000.” This Friday marks the kickoff of the twenty-sixth annual Chicago Latino Film Festival. With programming beginning at the Landmark Century Centre Cinema and the Instituto Cervantes, the festival will showcase more than 120 films, documentaries and shorts from around the world. “It used to be New York and San Francisco,” says Vargas, about outside perceptions of cultural hubs in America. “Now for Europe and Latin America, when they look at the States, Chicago is occupying an important point on the map.” Ricardo Gamboa, a Chicago-born performance poet shares a similar sentiment, “There’s the Nuyoricans with stories in New York, Cubans from Miami, the very pastoral lives of Texas, but our [Mexican-Americans in Chicago] stories are often ignored.” Gamboa will be premiering a short titled, “The Southside has Many Beauty Queens” at this year’s festival. “It’s about South Side Latinos, and those that are denied opportunities. And that’s not an old story, it’s continuing generation after generation,” says Gamboa. The festival runs until April 29, and individual screening tickets as well as package deals are available. “The films keep moving and evolving and reflecting what is going on,” says Vargas. “Every year is different.” (Peter Cavanaugh)

Jacques Rivette with Jane Birkin

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Highlights of the final week of the 13th European Union Film Festival at Siskel include Bruno Dumont’s “Hadewijch,” (Sat, Wed) and Jacques Rivette’s “Around a Small Mountain” (Sun-Mon). Dumont’s provocations have ranged from the murders of “L’humanite” to the sex-crazed “Twenty-nine Palms,” yet there’s something in his latest, a study of the boundaries of belief and fanaticism in Europe today, seen through the eyes of a teenage girl shunned from becoming a nun, who takes up with other religions in unexpected ways. Dumont delivers potent shocks, but the most potent aspect of all is his attention to faces and to light: I’m not sure about the coherence of the underlying ideas, but the images are filled with mystery and concentration. Eighty-year old Jacques Rivette’s “Around A Small Mountain,” runs hardly eighty minutes, and its slightness echoes his lifelong fascination with acting and role-playing. The last shot placidly observes as a full moon is slowly occluded by glaucous clouds: the clouding of sight, memory, the pulling of a final curtain. There’s also a  repeat of Peter Bagh’s “Helsinki Forever” (Sun), memorable a poetic city symphony and cinema-essay, drawing on archival and fictional footage of the surprisingly much-observed location. (Ray Pride)

For a full schedule, go to siskelfilmcenter.org.

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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.