I just got this sneak preview in the mail last night. There are several things this year that are quite simply going to rock. If anyone would like to contribute to helping with the selection process i would love to hear your thoughts.
A SNEAK PREVIEW OF THE CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL’S
40TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION
CHICAGO – August 25 – The Chicago International Film Festival, the oldest competitive film festival in North America, will bring more than 100 exciting feature films and 40 short films from around the world to Chicago, October 7-21. In celebration of the Festival’s 40th Anniversary, this year’s program will feature more films, new venues, bigger cash prizes, more panel discussions and a retrospective of directors the Festival has championed.
"Anniversaries are often a time to pause and look back. But we’ve always focused on discovery. So at 40 years young, we’re still fixed on the future… with a twist," said Festival Founder and Artistic Director Michael Kutza. "This year we’re pulling out all the stops with an expanded program that celebrates our history and looks ahead."
Building on the Opening Night excitement from previous years, the 2004 Chicago International Film Festival has added a Gala Grand Finale evening and a high profile Centerpiece screening for its anniversary. The Festival's three marquee evenings will each feature a widely anticipated film with special guests on hand to make each night truly memorable.
Kicking off the Festival on Thursday, October 7th, the Opening Night will feature an exclusive pre-reception party at the Chicago Cultural Center (77 E. Randolph St.) in the Sidney R. Yates Gallery, complete with cocktails, wine and hors d'oeuvres from Chicago's renowned Lettuce Entertain You restaurants. Then guests will head down State Street for the Gala premiere screening of an exciting new film at The Chicago Theatre (175 N. State St.).
The Festival's mid-point will be marked this year with a special Centerpiece screening of Marc Forster's latest film Finding Neverland, starring Johnny Depp as James M. Barrie, the author of the beloved children’s story Peter Pan. Set in turn-of-the-century London, the story follows Barrie's professional journey from floundering playwright to surprising success, focusing on his creative process in bringing the timeless tale to life. Following the screening, Forster will be on hand to answer audience questions and talk about the making of his latest film.
The Festival's Grand Finale, to be held Thursday, October 21st at the Cadillac Palace (151 W. Randolph St.), will feature an on-stage tribute to Academy Award-winning director Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump, Cast Away, Back to the Future) hosted by Tom Hanks. Following the tribute, the Festival will screen the duo's latest collaboration, The Polar Express, the story of a young boy who journeys to the North Pole, discovering along the way that the wonder of life never fades for those who believe.
The following is a brief sampling of the 100+ feature films from more than 40 countries that will be showcased during the 2004 Festival. (If the film has been assigned to a specific competition or category in the Festival, it is noted afterward in italics.) The remainder of the Festival's program, along with a schedule of events and showtimes, will be released in mid-September.
Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kevern’s acerbic comedy, Aaltra (Belgium), offers a twist on the road-movie. After bouts of petty bickering, two feuding Belgian neighbors come to blows and are run over by a tractor, leaving them paralyzed, wheelchair-bound, and simmering with spite. Redirecting their rage toward all they meet, the embittered duo hit the road on an unpredictable odyssey to confront the fateful tractor’s manufacturer.
Travis Klose’s Arakimentari (U.S.-Japan) fascinatingly captures the compulsive and controversial personality of Japanese photographer/provocateur Nobuyoshi Araki. Araki is a captivating subject, boasting 300 books, ranging from celebrity portraits to landscapes to erotic bondage imagery, and a notorious claim to have slept with every female subject. DOCUFEST COMPETITION
Kinji Fukusaku’s 1973 Japanese classic, Battles Without Honor and Humanity, is a rare and critical perspective on the history of Japan after World War II, which chronicles the rise of gangs and ruthless turf wars. This tour-de-force revolutionized the yakuza genre, launched Fukasaku to international stardom, and influenced a generation of filmmakers worldwide with its ecstatic hand-held widescreen camerawork, inspired editing, and sprawling story.
Spanish director Miguel Albaladejo reinterprets traditional concepts of family in Bear Cub, portraying the unlikely bond between a sexually—and steamily—active gay dentist and his precocious nine-year-old nephew. Temporarily charged with the boy’s care, he modifies his behavior and discovers an unexpected parental instinct, in the process alarming the boy’s grandmother, as he considers the unique prospect of a long-term relationship.
First-time director Mohsen Amiryoussefi combines droll wit with a flair for visual gags in Bitter Dream (Iran), his offbeat meditation on life and death. After being visited (via television) by Azrael, the angel of death, a cantankerous funeral director feels the sudden need to make amends to his mistreated employees. Unfortunately, they don’t quite share his sense of urgency in this offbeat black comedy.
Rodney Evans's ambitious Sundance prizewinner, Brother to Brother (U.S.), engages the theme of cultural legacy by imagining a surreal encounter between a young, black, gay artist and a forgotten figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Escorted back to the Harlem of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, Perry Williams finds inspiration and solidarity in another generation’s similar struggles with racism, homophobia and convention. BLACK PERSPECTIVES
In Campfire (Israel), Joseph Cedar explores the desperate need to belong, finding in fiction insights into the tribal conflicts of the Middle East. Hoping to gain acceptance within a religious settlement in the West Bank, a recently widowed mother of two must choose between her integrity and communal strictures.
An accumulation of unflinching real-life standoffs over border crossings, between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians, builds a powerful indictment of power and subjugation in Yoav Shamir’s incisive, prizewinning documentary, Checkpoint (Israel). As everyday pleas—to simply get to work, attend funerals, or take children to the hospital—go unheard, a destructive, charged atmosphere of humiliation and resentment emerges. DOCUFEST COMPETITION
Hungary once again proves to be fertile ground for challenging work, yielding a Dante-like descent into modern-day netherworlds. Benedek Fliegauf delivers on the promise of his debut, Forest, with the ambitious, David Lynch/Bela Tarr-inspired, Dealer, a brooding, impressionistic day-in-the-life odyssey through junkie sub-culture. NEW DIRECTORS COMPETITION
Sultry performances, documentary-style visuals, and a typically vibrant soundtrack melding ethnic rhythms and techno beats fuel Tony Gatlif’s (Latcho Drom, Gadjo Dilo) spirited multicultural trek for identity, Exiles (France). Two Euro-slackers hook up, and, on a whim, make a pilgrimage to Algeria, encountering crafty gypsies, Algerian ex-patriots, and seductive Spaniards in flamenco bars as they seek the common heritage which has previously eluded them both.
Four Shades of Brown (Sweden) deftly blends the hilariously ironic, the heart wrenching, and the genuinely disturbing in four stories revolving around loneliness, miscommunication, and fatherhood. Created by the comedy troupe Killingggänget, with Tomas Alfredson directing, the film evokes Ulrich Seidl’s Dog Days, Roy Andersson’s Songs From the Seventh Floor, and even Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia.
Cinematic history itself comes to life in Jacques Richard’s documentary, Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the Cinematheque (France). Langlois’s Cinematheque saved innumerable films from oblivion, and ultimately inspired Godard’s generation of filmmakers. After government authorities unceremoniously dismissed Langlois in 1968, cineastes demanded and won his reinstatement as head of the Cinemathèque in a foreshadowing of that summer’s volatile political rebellions. DOCUFEST COMPETITION
Albert ter Heerdt’s Hush Hush Baby! (The Netherlands) proved a huge hit in Holland, and was embraced especially by the Moroccan youth. The story centers on an aimless youth’s often hilarious but determined fight to break free from parental customs and clichéd cultural expectations.
Nimrod Antal’s hallucinatory, noirish hit thriller, Kontroll (Hungary), tracks a hooded serial killer, a ragtag crew of metro ticket inspectors, and a girl dressed as a teddy bear, who haunt the Budapest underground, setting the stage for a paranoid, urban nightmare as dark and labyrinthine as the tunnels themselves. NEW DIRECTORS COMPETITION
Irreverence gives way to inspiration in Christophe Barratier’s heart-warming debut, Les Choristes (France). A newly hired music teacher at a boy’s reformatory in post-war France feels elation, then shock, as he discovers the cruelties of a rigid, ineffectual headmaster. Determined to intervene, he organizes a choir, through which the boys slowly discover their voices and their individual potential.
Lipstick & Dynamite, Piss & Vinegar: The First Ladies of Wrestling (U.S.) gives a jaw-dropping account of ‘Girl Wrestlers’—teens hired by post-war carnival promoters as sideshow attractions. Chicago artist Ruth Leitman documents their tough lives, inside and outside the ring and discovers dynamic personalities that subvert preconceptions of women of the era.
Set in a colorful Buenos Aires barrio, Daniel Burman’s heartfelt and humorous Lost Embrace (Argentina) follows one man’s search for answers to the mysteries of life and his own complex identity in the wake of his father’s unexplained exodus to Israel thirty years earlier.
Achim von Borries (Goodbye Lenin’s co-writer) explores youthful excess in his seductive period drama Love in Thoughts (Germany), as a circle of 1920s bohemians recklessly pursue absolute freedom during a weekend orgy of sex, drugs, and alcohol. But romantic idealism gives way to inescapable human longing, jealousy and despair, as tragedy looms in the distance.
81-year-old Ousmane Sembene (Faat Kine), the father of African cinema, weaves a richly textured feminist parable of one woman’s rebellion against a cruel village ritual in Moolaadé (Senegal), a top prizewinner at Cannes. BLACK PERSPECTIVES
In Laure Duthilleul’s Nelly (France), a village doctor’s abrupt demise inspires comically inappropriate responses to tragedy from his family, friends, and his bewildered widow (Sophie Marceau), who won’t give up his body.
French New Wave icon Jean-Luc Godard’s Our Music (Switzerland) is a provocative visual poem on war, myth and the moving image. Dividing his composition into three realms, like Dante’s classic Inferno, Godard combines fictional and documentary footage in ways that are both shocking and philosophical.
In Michalis Reppas and Thanassis Papathanassiou’s smoldering thriller, Oxygen (Greece), family dysfunction in a stifling Greek town boils over into scandal, blackmail, and deadly intrigue. This contemporary update on a Greek tragedy will leave audiences breathless with its taboo-shattering machinations (centering on a three-timing bisexual boytoy) and totally unexpected ending.
Benoit Jacquot’s (School of Flesh) stylish study of doomed love and alienated youth, Right Now (France), perfectly captures a young woman (French ingénue Isild Le Besco) quietly, yet dangerously adrift. Living moment to moment, she enjoys a carefree night of passion with an exotic stranger that sends her life careening irrevocably off course.
Zhu Wen sketches a bittersweet coming-of-old-age adventure in South of the Clouds (China). A stubborn retiree rejects the “New China” capitalist set when he chooses to invest his savings in a highly personal journey down roads not taken, rather than in his yuppie daughter’s aerobics business. NEW DIRECTORS COMPETITION
Srdjan Vuletic presents a fresh coming-of-age story with Summer in the Golden Valley (Bosnia-Herzegovina), set in a war-torn Sarajevo that offers a legacy of crumbling neighborhoods, fallen principles, and social disarray. A monstrous debt passed on from his deceased father plunges a typically disaffected teen—fantasizing about sex, rapping and getting high—into adulthood as he sets out to collect the money in the only way he knows how… illegally. NEW DIRECTORS COMPETITION
Marco Kreuzpaintner’s liberating Summer Storm (Germany), an Audience Award-winner at the Munich Film Festival, depicts the intense sexual confusion of a young man on the threshold of adulthood. As Tobi grows increasingly jealous over his rowing partner’s deepening relationship with his girlfriend, he realizes that his own feelings towards his friend run much deeper than he had previously thought.
In his prizewinning documentary, Tarnation (U.S.), Jonathan Caouette presents an intensely personal family story of mental illness, drug-induced trauma, and gay self-discovery. Roger Ebert describes the schizophrenically entertaining concoction of photomontage, glam-rock music video (à la Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine), and home movies as “powerful and heartbreaking, brave, and technically impressive.”
Greek auteur Theo Angelopoulos (Eternity and a Day) has never shied away from tackling grand themes. In 1977, his political epic, The Hunters, won the Chicago International Film Festival’s most prestigious prize; a decade later, the Film Festival awarded him two prizes for his haunting fable of origin, Landscape in the Mist. Angelopoulos is at his most evocative in Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow, a poetic meditation on the fate of Greece in the twentieth century, condensed into the tragic events of one woman’s life. His signature command of lyrical imagery, majestic set pieces, music, and movement once again leave an indelible impression in this, the first of an intended trilogy.
The Wooden Camera (South Africa) follows two Johannesburg street kids whose lives are forever changed by a chance encounter with a corpse and its worldly possessions—a video camera and a gun. Ntshaveni Wa Luruli, former assistant to Spike Lee, creates a poignant allegory for the adolescent choices that often determine adult lives, in a movie with refreshing all-age appeal.
The 2004 Festival will also feature more than 40 short films from around the world. These films showcase works from bright young filmmakers and established directors, such as Karin Junger and Brigit Hillenius’s Great! (The Netherlands), in which teenage girls rib one another in a park while chattering about their budding sexuality. As boys approach, each deals with them differently, mostly coldly.
In addition to its regular slate of groundbreaking current films, the 2004 Festival will also celebrate its history by bringing back to Chicago some of the most popular directors honored during the past four decades to share their work with the city. Some of the confirmed participants in the "Four Decades of Discovery" program include István Szabó, Liv Ullmann, and Patrice Chéreau, among others still to be announced.
Most Festival films will be shown at Landmark's Century Centre Cinema (2828 N. Clark St.) as well as the AMC River East 21 (322 E. Illinois St.) and Thorne Auditorium (375 E. Chicago Ave.). Additional film selections and the screening schedule will be released in mid-September. Individual tickets for all regular Festival screenings go on sale September 24th, although advance purchase tickets for the Opening Night and Grand Finale events will be available August 27th and range in price from $15-$20. Festival passes are also available and range from $50-$300.
For up-to-date and detailed Festival information, visit www.chicagofilmfestival.com or call 312-332.FILM.