“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 Senior Editor and Film Critic. He is a contributing editor of Filmmaker magazine.
Ray’s history of Chicago Ghost Signs is planned for publication next year. Previews of the project are on Twitter and on Instagram. More photography on Instagram.
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