Film 50: Chicago’s Screen Gems 2019

Left to right: Clare Cooney, Shane Simmons, Eddie Linker and Susie Linker/Photo: Sally Blood

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Susie Linker and Eddie Linker, Clare Cooney and Shane Simmons
Co-Founders, Artistic Director and Operations Director, Elevated Films
“We started Elevated Films after a few of our movies played at Rooftop Films in New York,” Eddie Linker says of the nonprofit seasonal independent film series. “We loved the vibe and the experience, and wanted to bring that to Chicago’s film community.” Rooftop Films helped them get started with a small joint venture, with a blueprint for what this would look like in Chicago. “These first-run independent film screenings on rooftops and alternative screening spaces around the city donate the proceeds to arts organizations and artistically inclined charities in Chicago,” says Clare Cooney, “providing a space for film lovers and filmmakers to gather, socialize and enjoy movies with a view in a way that is approachable and affordable for everyone.” Eddie Linker, whose production company is Forager Films, says “So many people on our board said they would help and Forager opens doors with distributors and gives us a level of credibility.” The organization’s mission is not only to provide word-of-mouth for worthy movies, but also to raise awareness and promote the arts in Chicago neighborhoods. “We added a charitable component as we saw funding for art programs in Chicago dropping,” Susie Linker says. “It’s important to give back, and help sustain local art and film programs in Chicago, but to ultimately have a direct impact on arts communities with inadequate resources. We partner with a different program at each event, and talk about their missions, donating net profits to each charity.” Linker says that Clare Cooney and Shane Simmons provide “the drive and energy to keep us going,” finding partners such as CH Distillery and the Ace Hotel. While Eddie Linker and Simmons are both producers, Linker sees them as separate pursuits. “Elevated has ambitious goals of trying to expose audiences to independent films while raising money for youth arts programs and arts-focused charities in Chicago. That means an Elevated Film event has to appeal to a fairly diverse audience and not entirely film people. There will be film people there, but we have to be very selective, because we are trying to expose a whole new audience to films they would not normally attend. We have to have films that challenge people, spark discussions, but still have something that will not turn off a casual filmgoer. Of course, we also want to help with ultimate box office and exposure for the distributor!” Simmons says, “We’ve taken on a ridiculous set of circumstances for our core screenings—it might rain, it might be too windy, there might be a concert next door we didn’t know about, or, on a summer night in Chicago, there just might be too many other fun things people want to do.” The most recent events have gone over capacity, insuring more contributions to arts organizations. Looking back, Cooney says, “We have been around only five years, but in five years, we have built an enthusiastic audience as well as giving back to youth arts groups and arts-focused charities, our primary goal. It’s community, support and art.” Looking forward, Eddie Linker says, “We have at least six film schools in Chicago alone, and we have all this talent. What we have done in the past is export great talent. There needs to be a better ecosystem. Hollywood makes great blockbusters. We need to make great movies.”

Raul Benitez and Nando Espinosa/Photo: Sally Blood

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Raul Benitez and Nando Espinosa
Lead Film Programmer and Programmer, Comfort Film
Raul Benitez describes Comfort Film simply: “I curate and exhibit films old and new that challenge the audience and expose them to films they have not seen or have seen, but are presented in a new way.” Nando Espinosa adds: “The work done at the Comfort Station in Logan Square is one of community engagement at its core. While there are routine responsibilities and basic AV tech support—something anyone can do, really—the series has grown as tall as it has, because it’s rooted in the deep bonds formed alongside and watered consistently with the Chicago audiovisual creative community: academically trained filmmakers, celluloid purists, quirky new media artists, sketch comedy web-series creators, and folks who last year thought of their first movie idea. They have a movie baby they wanna share with a Chicago audience and we welcome them into our home—for Raul and I, really, a second home—and invite the public for a night of fun and pride. We work with creators and curators directly, collaboratively, as programming staff and front-of-house staff, so it’s definitely a more intimate experience for the filmmakers— they know we’re there with them all the way, and not just via email or as uninformed, uninterested tech crew.” Benitez insists on collaboration, and credits assistant film programmers Emily Perez and Mathew Tapey. “Collaborations are essential to our programming philosophy at Comfort Station. Having partners in programming really helps open up our programming and the type of films we can show. We partner with other local film organizations as well as local programmers who don’t have a regular venue. Each partnership and collaboration brings in programming that as a single organization we wouldn’t be able to have.” “I say this with equal amounts of pride and sadness,” Espinosa continues, “but we have outlived many, many film series and spaces for the Chicago film community. Pride because we know we deserve it, sadness because friends had to close shop. We owe that to a brick-and-mortar building that allows us to have the series running, yes, but also to the grind and talking people’s ears off. We follow up with emails, show up to events, invite people to walk the space with us, we hype the artists and filmmaker, and musicians, too. We engage fully, with love and determination. I hope we have the steam to keep going five, ten more years. The landscape of the neighborhood might keep changing, but Raul and I will still be around with our inflatable screen and our AV cart.”

M.E. Barker and Scott Schwartz /Photo: Sally Blood

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Scott Schwartz and M.E. Barker
Heads of Film and TV Development, Nice Work Films
“Our philosophy relies upon the ideology that Chicago can and should aim higher to compete with the coasts,” says Nice Work Films’ Scott Schwartz. “Chicago filmmakers are problem-solvers by nature, conditioned by limited resources and contacts to make the best out of what we have. Our goal has always been to help elevate Chicago’s status as a major film market, while fostering relationships with filmmakers, storytellers, and innovators who operate outside of the traditional Hollywood system.” Current projects run from an MGM musical being written, a limited series co-produced with Chance the Rapper about Harold Washington and co-producing music videos for tracks off Chance’s new album, “The Big Day.” A documentary series from a feminist perspective, “Boobs” will announce partnerships soon. As a two-person team, Schwartz says, their work is comprehensive problem-solving. “We wear a lot of hats and must create our own systems to fill in for roles that traditional film studios have. Every facet of ideation, development and execution is done between the two of us, as well as our partner Pat Corcoran. To just call ourselves producers or development executives doesn’t capture the full picture.” Barker adds, “We subscribe to the ideology that when one Chicagoan wins, we all win. But we still struggle to break free from our bootstrap mentality. Chicago filmmakers often ask for what they need rather than what they want. We want big studio projects, first-look deals, high budgets, high talent to help give Chicago filmmakers the resources they need to increase our production value and visibility to truly compete.” Looking back, Schwartz says, “We never thought that at twenty-five years old, we’d be sitting in boardrooms with the heads of nearly seventeen studios and production companies, pitching a major film, let alone selling one. So it’s clear that the paradigm of the TV and film industry is changing in a dramatic way and we are proud to represent that change through our young, outside-the-box approach to packaging and selling projects.” Beyond business, he says, “We want to bring more major projects from Chicago to the rest of the world. If we can accomplish that, we can take control of our city’s narrative to promote an authentic vision of what Chicago is.”

Amir George/Photo: Sally Blood

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Amir George
Filmmaker; Co-Founder and Curator, Black Radical Imagination; Film Programmer, True/False Film Fest 
“My work consists of tapping into the unknown,” says filmmaker-programmer Amir George. “Organizing screenings, people and productions. I watch a lot of movies. I aim for the films I’m making to push past the conventions of storytelling, and be more representative of people that look like me.” George is entering his second season as one of the three programmers for True/False, the premiere doc fest located in the middle of Missouri in Columbia. “True/False is a destination festival, it’s where people go to discover things. We’re thinking about nonfiction films that push the form forward. Being on the programming team has been invigorating to my filmmaking practice.” George sees the past decade as positive. “There was definitely less diversity in the community. There was also less collaboration and resources for local filmmakers to get work made. By 2029 I expect there to be more films shot in Chicago that are stories from the city. I expect there to be more voices being able to make work and an overall better film culture. I’m always on a quest to do more for the city and the film community. My role as a filmmaker is to keep producing work in the city. As a programmer, I want to keep championing unseen works made by others in the city and bring them to larger platforms. My work has and can take place anywhere in the world but I always plan to have a base in Chicago.”

Amy Guth/Photo: Sally Blood

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Amy Guth
Executive Director, Midwest Independent Film Festival; filmmaker and journalist; Host, WGN Radio and Crain’s Daily Gist Podcast
“People often say, ‘Wow, you do so many different things!”’ Amy Guth says, “and that’s never not weird to me, because everything I do is so closely tied to storytelling and narrative and setting stories free into the world. So, it’s always connected and always driving toward the same end goal to me.” Of the Midwest Independent Film Festival, where she took the reins in July 2018, she says, “From the outside looking in, it might seem like MIFF is simply a screening and party on the first Tuesday of each month, but it’s an organization with room to keep growing, and a wonderful mix, day in and day out, of reviewing submissions and seeing the amazing work here in the Midwest, programming, community partnerships, operations, event production, working with amazing volunteers, members and festival goers to make it all work. MIFF has seen dramatic transformation in the last couple of years, and leading an organization through culture change cannot be quick and easy, but deliberate and with very clear focus so every decision can support the big picture. You have to have thick skin and a lot of self-confidence, because most people deeply resist even the most positive of change!” Similarly, Guth sees the past couple of years as equally transformational. “Well, longer than that, really, but having a foot in the journalism world and a foot in the film world, I feel like I’ve had a front-row seat to the digital transformation in the past decade. Initially, I didn’t see many people taking their digital lives too seriously and taking control of the tools available as creators, but that has changed in the last couple of years in that regard and people aren’t laughing off digital tools and are investing the time to learn and use them appropriately, in essence, taking their fates into their own hands. What hasn’t changed is the community feel here; Chicago is the biggest small town there is, and there’s a lot of community bootstrapping that is amazing and wonderful. The downside is that we’ve all gotten so good at wearing so many hats on each other’s sets that at some point we risk diluting the strength of each individual artist’s talent. We have a long way to go in terms of coming together and making sure every artist from any neighborhood in the city has a seat at the proverbial table so we can help each other thrive at different career stages.” With MIFF moving into its fifteenth year in 2020, Guth says her “big thing is to make sure the whole local film community has what it needs—not just some of the film community, or people at certain career levels, but actively holding space for everyone from beginners to veteran filmmakers to give and receive, grow and thrive, and help the whole community move forward.”

Sara Chapman/Photo: Sally Blood

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Sara Chapman
Executive Director, Media Burn Independent Video Archive
Sara Chapman started with Media Burn at its beginnings in 2003, and has been executive director for thirteen years. A unique archive of video produced by activists and artists that was a small local entity has grown to global recognition with more than twenty-million views of the videos, with more than 3,000 online (of 8,000 total) at the Media Burn site. Chapman recently created and managed a breakthrough project on “fake news” and intercultural exchange with two Americans and two Russian documentary filmmakers. Chapman has also raised funding from groups including the MacArthur Foundation, the Driehaus Foundation, the National Archives, and the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation. “Our mission is to use archival media to deepen context and encourage critical thought through a social justice lens,” Chapman says. “Media Burn was born out of a tradition of experimentation with the medium of video for art, performance, and guerrilla television. Our founder, Tom Weinberg, chose the name for our archive as a deliberate evocation of its anarchic, satirical spirit.” That spirit drives the guiding philosophy, “that artists have historically functioned as a check on official narratives, and that independent creators may communicate more truthfully than traditional media sources, even when creating experimental or non-narrative work,” she says. “Our work as an archive is aligned with the goal of using artistic practice to elevate the hidden stories of uncelebrated people and places. Our role is to give artists the tools they need to create, and one of those tools is video source material.” The success of the Russia collaboration led to the next project: “This type of work will be more and more our focus in the future. We are now proposing a more ambitious artist residency with China. China is the locus of perhaps the most vibrant and groundbreaking underground experimental filmmaking in the world today. China’s independent filmmakers create films that are routinely rejected by state censors, preventing them from being officially screened.”

Michael W. Phillips Jr./Photo: Sally Blood

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Michael W. Phillips Jr.
Founder, Executive Director, South Side Projections
Michael W. Phillips Jr. has been around. “I was the director of the LaSalle Bank/Bank of America Cinema from 2006 until it closed in 2010, the founding film programmer of Chicago International Movies & Music Festival (and programmed it five of the first seven years), the cinematheque and videotheque manager at Facets in 2010-2011, the founding director of the Black Cinema House (now Stony Island Arts Bank Cinema), and I’ve worked as events coordinator at the Film Studies Center since 2015.” But his most personal contribution to the current scene is South Side Projections, which “shows rare films—often forgotten documentaries on social issues, but we cast a pretty wide net—at locations around Chicago’s South Side. We don’t have a headquarters; instead we partner with museums, art centers, universities and other organizations to bring film screenings and discussions to their audiences. There’s almost always a discussion, with a filmmaker, an activist, and so on.” There are plans to distribute rediscoveries in the near future. “We keep finding films that really should be out there, but there’s nobody championing them,” Phillips says. “We can be that champion. We’re probably going to start with Jonathan Rosenbaum’s prep-school friend, the anarchist filmmaker Nick Macdonald, who we rediscovered and brought to town for a packed screening in 2016. He’s had all of his films restored and digitized, and we’ll do a DCP of a representative selection of his films as well as a limited-run Blu-ray set. We’re also looking into Liz White’s ‘Othello,’ the first version featuring a black actor as Othello. People need to be able to see these things, and we’re in a position to make that happen.” Since starting SSP in 2011, he says, “I love how film on the South Side has grown. I don’t get out to other people’s shows as much as I should, but people like the kids at filmfront, Jacqueline Stewart’s Cinema 53, the new Chicago South Side Film Festival, they’re all doing amazing work. It proves that audiences are still hungry for that in-person experience, seeing a movie with a bunch of people and talking about it afterward. It’s still hard to get people to make the trip down here, and media coverage is abject, but the scene is strong. And it seems like there’s more crosstown cooperation. We’ve worked with the Nightingale, CUFF, and Comfort Film, we did a reading and screening at Bucket O’Blood Books and Records. Chicago Film Society has partnered with the Film Studies Center. The Americas Media Initiative (which shows Caribbean and Latin American films) has partnered with everybody, including us. Maybe that means programmers are less territorial than they used to be? I think it’s going to continue, expand even, because except for a few destination places like the Siskel and the Music Box, you have to work hard to get word to the right audiences.”

Sergio Mims/Photo: Sally Blood

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Sergio Mims
Co-Founder, Co-Programmer, Black Harvest Film Festival; film critic and historian; Co-Founder, black film website Shadow and Act
Sergio Mims, a mainstay on the Chicago film scene for nearly four decades, describes himself “simply as someone who wants people to know and appreciate films more and then maybe explore more on their own and discover a whole new world.” At the twenty-fifth edition of Black Harvest in August, Mims received the Gene Siskel Film Center Legacy Award, “a great honor and the first award I’ve ever achieved for anything!” he says, laughing. “I really didn’t expect it! When I got involved with Black Harvest twenty-five years ago I did it because I love movies, and of course black movies and I thought it was important to get black film seen, ones that normally wouldn’t get any sort of distribution. It wasn’t for acclaim. I never expected it to last this long at the beginning and now it has become a major part of my life, which I can’t imagine without it. As for the award? Well, it means that I’m old and that I’ve contributed something worthwhile. When I look back, I think I’ve done good, as the saying goes. I’ve learned that although there are triumphs and disappointments, you can’t predict what’s going to happen. I always wanted to do DVD commentaries and never thought I ever would get to do that. I’ve done four already [including Robert Downey Sr.’s ‘Putney Swope’ and Melvin Van Peebles’ ‘Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song’] and have another three coming. I love it, not just because I want people to know more about film, but it means that I have developed a reputation for someone who knows their shit. I just still want to be involved with films in some capacity. I can’t imagine anything else. As for the future? Your guess is as good as mine. Anything is possible.”

Emily Eddy/Photo: Sally Blood

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Emily Eddy 
Director, Nightingale Cinema; Programmer, Onion City Experimental Film + Video Festival; Development and Marketing Manager, Video Data Bank
Emily Eddy, one of the most visible local programmers, describes herself as “a curator and an artist, but mostly I’m an advocate of experimental film and video, meaning that I screen and promote moving-image art and artists that fall outside of so-called normal cinematic styles.” Eddy differs with the notion such work is difficult: “Very often, experimental film and video is seen as too serious, too academic, inaccessible, and intimidating for people who aren’t familiar with it. Through my work, I aim to make the case that experimental film and video can be just as accessible, relatable, emotional and moving as traditional cinema. I feel passionately that experimental screenings should be open, fun, welcoming spaces, and that everyone, regardless of prior knowledge of film, can get something out of the experience.” Venues matter, too. “Every screening space is different in their programming, mission and community. There are a lot of events I program at the Nightingale that I wouldn’t program elsewhere because it’s a very open-ended space where—almost—anything goes. Whenever I program elsewhere, I think, who is the community and regular audience of that space; what is their mission or goals in programming; and based on that information, what voices do I want to present? I try to incorporate artists that the audience of that space will know, mixed with makers that they probably haven’t seen yet. The goal of a curator should be to champion artists, find new audiences for their work, and being able to contextualize their work through writing. I keep those things in mind when presenting a program.” At the end of her first decade as a Chicagoan, Eddy says, “I couldn’t say I knew anything about Chicago’s film community, but my freshman year of college I went to almost every ‘Conversations at the Edge’ screening, which was—and continues to be—a transformative and exciting screening series for me. When I found the Nightingale and started going to more underground and DIY screenings I felt embraced by the hybrid film and art community, and felt like I found my thing.” She cautions, “That said, what feels comfortable to me does not necessarily feel comfortable for others, and I hope the film community in the coming decade grows in diversity of women, people of color and queer voices between artists, curators and administrators.”

Christy LeMaster/Photo: Sally Blood

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Christy LeMaster
Assistant Curator of Public Programs, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago 
After a long and abundant run with the Nightingale, Christy LeMaster brings her curatorial acumen to the MCA, working with a team of colleagues to select and produce performances and public programs in multiple spaces in the museum. She programs screenings at the 300-seat theater, as well as working with artists and thinkers to program events for the Commons, the MCA’s space for art and civic engagement, and organize moving image art for exhibitions. “The MCA presents a wide variety of moving image-based art that invites active viewing and encourages shared understanding of the important issues of our time,” LeMaster says, “presenting both independent films and artist-made cinema, alongside event-centered popular movies.” She sees this as an exciting time to be part of the moving image community in Chicago. “There are so many artists and organizations working on innovating the form from all angles. Not only do we have multiple places to see the best new cinema work from all over the world, Chicago visual artists are inviting moving image into their practices more and more, and we are home to really exciting production platforms at all levels of professionalization.” LeMaster builds on a decade of expanding traditional notions of moviegoing. “From working for different film festivals to founding the Nightingale and now at the MCA, I have always valued work that alters viewers’ relationship to the ubiquity of moving image in daily life. I am drawn to works that challenge narrative form, play with genre, and correct the cinema cannon to include more voices. It is exciting to work for an institution that supports moving image as an important contemporary art form.”