"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)

As part of its ongoing exploration of foreign film, the Logan Square International Film Series (http://tinyurl.com/squarelogan) is showing animated movies from around the world this month.

Peter Kaplan’s series proves that you don’t need big backers, big names or even a big screen to get a film festival off the ground. Started in January 2010 as a way for Kaplan to meet new people and see foreign films, the series is screened in his Logan Square apartment, either on his TV or using a projector. Next month, the series will be moving to Comfort Station on Milwaukee Avenue. Josh Samuels became a regular attendee and eventually the series’ curator after seeing a flyer at a Logan Square coffee shop. “I was like, wow, whoever is doing something like this out of their apartment is probably an interesting fellow, plus I like avant-garde film,” he says.

The animated films on offer this month include both feature-length and short works, and hail from Japan, the USA and France. Nina Paley’s Flash-animated “Sita Sings the Blues” weaves together episodes from the artist’s life and snippets from the Ramayana. The film garnered wide acclaim on its 2008 release, including a long rave by Roger Ebert on his blog. The Academy Award-nominated “Les Triplettes de Belleville,” director Sylvain Chomet’s first feature, is a wildly inventive homage to Jacques Tati and Jazz-age Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons. Samuels compares the month’s last feature, “Paprika,” to a darkly Lynchian version of “Inception.” Each screening includes shorts selected by Samuels. (Benjamin Rossi)

The Logan Square International Film Series screens at 3421 West Medill every Sunday at 7pm.

The Portuguese Nun

By Ray Pride

Old Europe still makes new movies like they used to.

The finance of feature films is troubled in every economy around the world, but judging from the always-indispensable European Union Film Festival at the Film Center, offering up sixty-four movies from twenty-four countries, there’s hope still. For the fourteenth annual edition, the entire month of March is given over again to an appealingly curated bunch of films as good as any under any given festival umbrella in Chicago. And I know I’ve said that for several years running—and it feels good to know that it’s not hype to say so.

Even to list the filmmakers whose newest work is shown alongside younger filmmakers sounds like a boast: pick any half dozen. The oh-so-French Catherine Breillat with her “postmodernized” retelling of “The Sleeping Beauty”; Portuguese maxi-minimalist Pedro Costa’s (“Vanda’s Room”) study of the actress-singer Jeanne Balibar as she and a guitarist rehearse a piece of music toward completion; and Spanish wild man Alex de la Iglesia (“The Perfect Crime”) with “The Last Circus,” a story of two rival clowns set during the Spanish Civil War. And: the fine chronicler of Gypsy culture, Tony Gatlif (“Latcho Drom”) with a portrait of a Rom family crossing France during World War II; 101-year-old miniaturist Manoel de Oliveira’s “The Strange Case of Angelica”; plus a new Steve Coogan-Rob Brydon comedy from Michael Winterbottom, the foodie satire, “The Trip.” Read the rest of this entry »

Brendt Barbur/Photo: Wilis Johnson

As the first brush of warm weather tempts Chicagoans out of their dens, a film festival celebrating bikes and riders returns to town starting February 25 to touch off the cycling season. The Bicycle Film Festival (bicyclefilmfestival.com) rings in its tenth anniversary with a bevy of films showcasing all things bicycle, from urban cycling to bike polo to BMX. The festival’s director, Brendt Barbur, created the event as a way to champion the urban bicycling movement after getting hit by a bus while riding his bike in 2000. Since then the festival has toured more than thirty cities from Taipei to Toronto, drawing more than 300,000 participants annually. The Viaduct Theater plays host to this year’s incarnation, screening some forty films. Highlights include “The Birth of Big Air,” a Spike Jonze-produced documentary about the triumphs and tribulations of legendary BMX biker Mat Hoffman; “Lucas Brunelle: Line of Sight,” which brings hair-raising urban cycling to the screen with helmet-cam footage of urban biking icon Lucas Brunelle’s adventures; and “Riding the Long White Cloud,” about a group of professional skateboarders who cycle around New Zealand’s beautiful North Island camping and skating as they go. Parties at Beauty Bar and Darkroom bookend the fest with music provided by DJs Pogo, Arturo and DJ Brad Owen. There’s even a free bike valet at all screenings courtesy of Active Transportation Alliance. Barbur says the festival offers a glimpse into “a biking movement that is rapidly emerging all around the world.” But non-bikers are welcome too. “People might think that BFF is just for bikers, but the films are strong on their own. It’s all about having a good time, and it’s okay to drive a car to the festival.” (Benjamin Rossi)

"HERE"

By Ray Pride

They come to the city on the hill, by air, by roads, seekers of wisdom headed west into the wilderness, into the mountains, beneath crystal blue skies, among dreamers and ideas in thin bracing air, amid Starbucks and Stella Artois, among official sponsors and “riff-raff” brands to the side, ten days formally kicked off with Robert Redford’s annual, perennial peroration of what independent cinema is and will be for the immediate future, foreseeable budgets and attention spans.

Sundance. Films and filmmakers, press agents and sales agents, and agents galore, shuttles shuttling the small hamlet of Park City, engorging its paths and runnels from its year-round resort-town population of under 10,000 to a figure estimated as high as fourteen million. Actually, it only seems that packed on opening weekend: 120,000 was one of the highest estimates, and it’s plausible—the traffic is worse than cross-town Manhattan even in the middle of the day, or Chicago when there’s a compelling multiple-car pileup on the side of the Kennedy. Read the rest of this entry »

Drunkboat

In its forty-sixth edition, a first look at the programming of the Chicago International Film Festival passes on retrospectives and sidebars, and most titles of interest are premieres of movies that should open in Chicago in coming months. (There are fourteen titles in the New Directors Competition, of which I’m one of the four judges; I hope there are discoveries there.) First week attractions of note that will be released soon are Clint Eastwood’s “Hereafter,” a multipart story by screenwriter Peter Morgan (“The Queen,” “Frost/Nixon”); “Stone,” a character study about infidelity and religious belief from John Curran (“We Don’t Live Here Anymore”); and Abbas Kiarostami’s “Certified Copy,” which won Juliette Binoche the Best Actress nod at Cannes 2010. Cannes’ Palme d’Or winner “Uncle Boonme Who Can Remember His Past Lives” by SAIC grad Apichatpong Weerasethakul is also on this week. Cannes offered a slot to the mini-indie teen drama “Myth of the American Sleepover” as well. Bertrand Tavernier turns to costume drama with “Princess of Montpensier” and Quebecois kid-actor-turned-boy-director Xavier Dolan-Tadros turns up with his second feature at the age of 21, “Les Amours Imaginaires,” a sweet title now known as “Heartbeats” in the U.S. Two films likely not to light up a screen again: “Revolución,” with short contributions from ten Mexican directors, including Carlos Reygadas, Gael García Bernal, Diego Luna, Gerardo Naranjo and Fernando Eimbcke. Rodrigo García’s contribution, a single take in which figures from the Mexican Revolution barrel full dress down a modern L.A. street, comes highly regarded. And, a real rarity, 2007′s unreleased “Drunkboat,”  a Chicago-set drama from gifted theater director Bob Meyer (a Chicago expat living in Paris), starring John Malkovich and John Goodman in a story of a boy growing up among alcoholic men. (Ray Pride)

All programs are at the River East.