“Endless Video,” Gwendolyn Infusino, CUFF comedy short inspired by her experience working at Odd Obsession
Festivaling and Films
There’s no static status quo with how films will be shown and seen on any given day, let alone the months ahead. Stock-standard for now is the range of “virtual cinema” platforms that allow brick-and-mortar arthouses like Siskel, the Music Box and Facets to offer the movies they might have shown in close, dark spaces in a parallel place instead of this sunken one. Similar platforms keep film festivals afloat, with fewer films and almost no festival, except for sometimes-prerecorded “Hollywood Squares”-styled teleconferenced Q&As. In Chicago, drive-in spaces have featured Music Box and Facets features, as well as events by local film festivals, which in November include the delayed-from-June Chicago Underground Film Festival, at twenty-seven the world’s longest-running of its kind, and the Chicago International Children’s Film Festival, at thirty-seven, the oldest and one of only two Oscar-qualifying children’s film festivals in the world. Keep up with films now in safety, alone, so there will be festivaling, again, together. (Ray Pride)
CUFF: cuff.org, November 9-22, including November 12-13 at the drive-in
Children’s International: festival.facets.org November 13-22
Ray Pride is Newcity’s film critic and a contributing editor to Filmmaker magazine.
His multimedia history of Chicago “Ghost Signs” will be published soon. Previews of the project are on Twitter and on Instagram as Ghost Signs Chicago. More photography on Instagram.
One Recommendation: December 2020 You deserve a DVD or Blu-ray today. Not just for the holidays, but as rebuke to “intellectual property” contracts.
Film Top 5: September 2020 Charlie Kaufman thinks, once more, as always, of ending it all; whimsitician Miranda July returns; Chicago Latino Film Festival goes virtual; Gerard Butler may or may not save the planet from a comet; and "Tenet" promises to time-invert over Labor Day in non-pandemic hotspot localities.
Film Top 5: October 2020 Chicago International, "Chicago 7" and "Candyman"'s Chicago; plus "WW1984" braces for social distancing and Kenneth Branagh again tunes up the tonsorial folderol as Hercule Poirot.
Film Top 5: April 2020 Traversing the landscapes of high studio filmmaking; Lisboa; Kyiv; in the footsteps of adventurer Bruce Chatwin and in the mind of a troubled young nurse.
