CIFF and Me
A Re-Cap of the Recently Concluded 60th Chicago International Film Festival
I found myself in moviegoing heaven when my then-girlfriend-now-wife and I moved to Chicago in 1988 after she was hired by the Chicago Public Library.
Our first apartment was about five blocks from Facets Multimedia, the cineclub/video store founded in 1975 by the late, great and much missed Milos Stahlik; and on Lincoln Avenue, within walking distance and across the street from each other, we had the equally missed Three Penny Cinema where we caught a good number of films at a good price during their second run, and the three-screen Cineplex Odeon owned Biograph Theater best known as the theater where Dillinger was mowed down by the FBI. The Red Line, also within walking distance, would take us to the Fine Arts Cinema near Michigan and Van Buren, and the Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute which at the time was located at the rear of the Art Institute of Chicago on Columbus Drive. But I became downright giddy when I found out that Chicago was also the home of the Chicago Latino Film Festival (CLFF) and, the grandmaster of them all, the Chicago International Film Festival (CIFF) founded in 1964 by Michael Kutza. Fankly, there was no way in heaven I could avoid them because, at the time, they both took place in the fall, with the CLFF calling the Three Penny and Facets home and CIFF, the Biograph.
I’ve been attending both festivals since then, first as a regular moviegoer, then as a journalist, and later as CIFF’s Publicity Manager (2011-2020) and CLFF’s Media Relations Coordinator (2011-present). I was, in fact, the only reporter working for a Spanish-language publication who covered CIFF’s Latin America, Spanish and Portuguese selections frequently when no other Spanish-language outlet would. While most of those Spanish-language outlets only covered CLFF’s big events like their Opening and Closing Night, I would focus on its heart and soul: the films, writing capsule reviews for ¡Exito! and Hoy (the Chicago Tribune’s Spanish-language publications) and the Tribune.
Part of the fun of going to a film festival (or for that matter, any arts festival) is discovering a new film, a new talent and sharing that joy with others. Festivals can also be a frustrating experience not only because of their, at times, overwhelming programming, but also because you may find yourself attending a film, concert, or play that did not meet your expectations. Selecting what to see is akin to throwing a pair of dice against the wall and both coming up with snake eyes.
The 60th Chicago International Film Festival ran this year from October 16th through the 27th in seven venues spread throughout the city. Although this year I didn’t see as many films as I would like to have seen (I was also covering the Destinos: 7th Chicago International Latino Theater Festival for the Chicago Reader as well as working on other freelance projects), I was really lucky with the nine I saw. But no one, no matter how devoted (unless they have too much disposable income and time to spare), can watch even half of the 122 features and 71 shorts presented at the this year’s Festival. On the plus side, a significant number of these features will be released theatrically in the next three to four months for awards consideration, which leaves space for one to try out any of the films that have yet to secure a distribution or streaming deal in this country. On the negative side, see above reference to rolling the dice.
Like last year, I wrote capsule reviews of some of the Festival’s selections from Latin America, Spain and Portugal for Third Coast Review: Paz Vega’s equally charming and devastating feature debut Rita; the cinephilic delight that is Jonás Trueba’s The Other Way Around; the Agnes Varda meets Afro-Brazilian road trip Suçuarana; and Transamazonia, among many other things (too many in fact), a flawed critique of white saviorism. The linked stories include capsule reviews of other Festival selections by Third Coast Review editor Lisa Trifone and film critic Steve Prokopy as well as other contributors. They all give you a sense of the breadth of this year’s programming. Sadly, no screeners were available nor press screenings scheduled for a couple of the more important Latin American films, especially Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here about a mother of five who has to deal with the consequences of the arrest and eventual disappearance of her husband by Brazil’s dictatorship; and Apocalypse in the Tropics, Brazilian documentarian Petra Costa’s follow-up to her extraordinary 2019 documentary The Edge of Democracy. Sony Pictures Classics will be releasing Salles’ film early next year and I am confident Costa’s film will secure some sort of distribution deal in the near future.
Here are, in alphabetical order, my capsule reviews for the other five films:
ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT
Winner of the Silver Hugo Jury Award in the Festival’s International Features Competition, Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light is the kind of film that requires a complete rewiring of our Westernized brains, especially for those who have never seen any of Satyajit Ray’s films (I must confess it’s been awhile for me). I don’t mean this as a put-down: the truth is that most of us haven’t been fully exposed to films coming out of Africa and Eastern Asia so when a film as poetic and delicate and observant as All We Imagine as Light reaches our screens via festivals or art houses, it’s like learning a new language.
The first film from an Indian filmmaker to compete for Cannes’ Palme d’Or in three decades, All We Imagine as Light centers on three women living and working in the hustling and bustling city of Mumbai: nurses Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha), who share an apartment, and nurse Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) who is being expelled from hers by the building’s new owners to make way for a luxury apartment building. Prabha’s boyfriend left her after their pre-arranged wedding; she’s been waiting for his return ever since. Anu is in love with a Muslim which is pretty much a no-no under India’s current regime. The movie’s first half introduces all three story strands and their isolation. Kapadia portrays Mumbai as a thriving, pulsing creature, its streets full of people, street vendors and stores, mopeds and other vehicles weaving their way around them. A place that attracts so many men and women from all corners of India that their voices, in their multiplicity of languages, are laid over the opening images of the city. Even the hospital all three work at is a buzzing, chaotic place, its dynamism serving as a contrast to these women’s more intimate lives.
The second half finds Prabha and Anu joining Parvaty on her return to her seaside village. While a Western filmmaker would squeeze the hell out of the city-country divide with the usual bromides of how rural life may actually be better, Kapadia approaches this second half with the same observant sensibility she did the first. The village may feel like a refuge from the big city for all three characters but it also provides them with the space and the sense of community denied them by the city.
ARMAND
One of the first films I saw at the Festival and I still can’t get it out of my head. I went in not knowing anything about it, not even that its director, Halfdan Olav Ullmann Tøndel is the grandson of Liv Ulmmann and Ingmar Bergman nor that this was his first film. It's one of those, “what the hell I just saw, I can’t believe they went there” films. In other words, my kind of flick.
Armand is a six-year-old boy who has been accused of sexually abusing a kid of the same age in school who the film later reveals to be a relative. Outside of a photo, Armand never appears on screen; this is, after all, about the adults in the room. The school’s administrators have scheduled a meeting between Armand’s mother, the rather unhinged actress Elisabeth (an amazing Renate Reinsve), and the parents of the kid, delegating teacher Sunna (Thea Lambrechts Vaulen) to lead the first part of the meeting. Sunna is naive, well-intentioned and clearly out of her depths. The school’s principal and another administrator who suffers from a severe nosebleed that pops up at the most inopportune moments soon take over the proceedings, tippy-toeing around the subject as they try to appease both sets of parents. Elizabeth’s behavior helps little: at one point she laughs hysterically, non-stop. The meetings go round in circles, the tension bubbling, the classrooms and hallways of the school acting as some sort of pressure cooker. There are some flights of fancy here including a couple of dance numbers which may be in Elisabeth’s imagination or that could also be seen as the director indulging in some unnecessary surrealist touches. I can’t help but admire Ullmann Tøndel’s chutzpah in coming up with such out-of-left-field touches.
Armand refuses to be pinned down. It challenges easy categorizations. It is daring, troubling and sometimes head-scratchingly frustrating. Ullmann Tøndel is one filmmaker I will keep my eye on after this.
BLITZ
Coming out of a press screening of Steve McQueen’s (12 Years a Slave, Small Axe) latest film, I regretted not having made the time to see his previous 4.5 hour documentary Occupied City when it played earlier this year at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago. I suspect that both films are in conversation with each other. Occupied City explores the extermination of Amsterdam’s Jewish population during World War Two by focusing on the present and looking, street by street, at the homes and businesses that have replaced those once occupied or owned by Jews. With Blitz, McQueen recreates the 1940-41 German bombing campaign against London and the United Kingdom not only to poke holes at the whole “Keep Calm and Carry On” idea but also to show a more pluralistic (and racist and classist) London than most British films of the era (and even of the last couple of decades) did.
Set in September 1940, McQueen throws you right into the aftermath of one of those bombings as firemen try to wrestle down a hose out of control while buildings are burning down around them. We are in the London neighborhood of Stepney Green, home of single mom and factory worker Rita (Saoirse Ronan), her nine-year-old mixed race son George (Elliott Heffernan on his feature debut) and granddad Albert (sensitively played by Paul Weller). George’s father was deported from England before George was born.
The government has ordered the evacuation of all children to the countryside to keep them safe from the bombing; George, who has never ventured outside of his neighborhood, doesn’t want to go. Bullied by a group of white boys, George jumps off the train and heads back home. On his way, he encounters a number of characters (some downright Dickensian) and dangers including a Nigerian watchman named Ife (Benjamin Cleméntine) who, with one action, turns into a role model for George, and a flooding underground tunnel. Meanwhile, believing her son to be in safe hands, Rita tries to maintain a sense of normalcy amidst all the air raids and bombing: she goes to work, participates in a BBC broadcast, volunteers in a community-run shelter, and goes off to the pub with her friends. But when she finds out that her child has gone missing, Rita begins a frantic search for him.
McQueen occasionally resorts to the tried and true clichés of old war melodramas to hook his audience. But he also critiques those clichés by immediately undermining them whether through Hans Zimmer’s unnerving machine-like score (the mechanical clangs of the factory, the whistle that you hear from the bombs as they float over London, and even the sirens are folded into the music) or by recreating the claustrophobia many residents probably felt being underground as the walls shook around them as the bombs made their target. He also undermines those clichés by showing those thin social cracks that not even war could hide.
Most of all, Heffernan’s performance is what makes Blitz shine and pack such a powerful wallop. As George, Heffernan delivers a performance full of curiosity, courage and grit. In his hands, George is a curious fellow, seeing this world outside his street with inquisitive eyes, processing the empathy and the cruelty and horror he sees around him. You feel these experiences will change him forever.
Blitz will be released in select theatres on November 8 and globally on Apple TV+ on November 22.
FLOW
2024 has been, so far, a so-so year for animated features made in the United States. Outside of Inside Out 2, most of the offerings have been lackluster additions to established franchises. However, across this planet’s many oceans, countries like France, Australia, Poland and Latvia (not to mention that reliable stalwart, Japan) have been filling that void with engaging, innovative and imaginative works of animation. Flow, the Latvian/French/Belgium co-production directed by Gints Zibalodis (who also co-wrote the script, composed the score, shot and edited the film), is a singular example.
His dialogueless film follows a kitten in a post-apocalyptic world who pretty much does what every kitty does: go out into the world in search for food, run away from a pack of dogs, find a comfortable place to sleep. There are remnants here and there that humans once occupied this world until they were wiped out: gigantic cat statues, pillars, wooden boats and entire towns emerging from the waters. A flood of biblical proportions forces all the animals to reach for higher ground. On his journey, our feline protagonist learns the value of collaboration, trust and solidarity, as other species join the kitty aboard a boat. And what an odd assortment of creatires: a labrador and his pack; a capybara; an acquisitive lemur who overzealously protects his stuff, particularly a mirror; and a secretary bird who, during this tale of survival, becomes a victim of his species’ own cruelty and the protagonist of a beautifully transcendent moment.
Flow is a film brimming with motion and adventure; it also eschews the anthropomorphic nature of animation to deliver us a realistic, relatable depiction of animal behavior. You can feel the care Zibalodis and his team took in making sure that these dogs behaved like dogs, the cat like cats, and so on. But most importantly, animation gave him and his team the freedom to shoot, edit and choreograph scenes that would have otherwise been impossible. The animation may be mostly digitally created, but the photorealistic backdrops and the hand drawn-like character design convey a sense of both a living picture book and a lived-in world.
A great film for kids and adults alike, Flow is the kind of artful family film festivals should program more often to nurture future generations of cinemagoers.
Flow opens in New York and Los Angeles on November 22 and expands nationwide thereafter.
NICKEL BOYS
For his 1946 adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake, actor/director Robert Montgomery decided to recreate Chandler’s first person narration by turning the camera into Philip Marlowe and shooting everything from his perspective. The approach was pretty gimmicky and it cost Montgomery his career at Metro-Goldwyn Meyer.
For his daring adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel Nickel Boys, director RaMell Ross not only adopts that similar approach but elevates it. Points of view shift between characters; not only do we see things from their perspective but we are also aware that in seeing, these characters are creating memories. That in seeing, we also bear witness to the cruelty and injustices inflicted upon them. But that is not the only tool he uses: there are archival images, still and in motion, flash forwards, close-ups; and associative montages.
Nickel Boys is told from the point of view of two African-American teens: Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wlson). We first meet Elwood as a young, observant child (played in the film’s opening scenes by Ethan Cole Sharp) in 1960s Tallahassee. One of his teachers encourages him to pursue a college education and Elwood does. But that promise is squashed when, while hitchhiking his way to college, the now gets into the wrong car and is arrested by the police as an accomplice in the robbery of a stolen vehicle. Sent to the Nickel Academy (based on the infamous Dozier School, a highly abusive reform school, also the inspiration for Tanarive Due’s award-winning horror novel The Reformatory) to complete his sentence, he bears witness to the cruelty (some of it taking place off-camera) and befriends Turner, whose view of the world is far more realistic and less hope-filled than Elwood’s.
Ross switches between each character’s perspectives, sometimes subverting film’s traditional shot/counter-shot style of shooting dialogue. Those shifts force us to pay more attention, to ascertain whose story we are following, what they are seeing, how they are seeing. The first-person camera treats them as individuals, not as gimmicks. It allows us to become them, to understand them, even to question how we see things, especially when those flash-forwards introduce us to an adult Elwood obsessed with the disinterment of bodies found in the academy’s lands.
There is more to Nickel Boys than meets the eye, especially after a first viewing. It’s rich, poignant, sometimes brutal, always loving (because there is no doubt that there is love amidst all the pain, cruelty and death). Nickel Boys is a film that deserves to be revisited more than once, with the promise that each time will prove to be rewarding in different ways.