Chicago International Film Festival programmers focus on directors, The late additions have been added, including two of the best American films of the year: "Spotlight," about the Boston Globe investigation of the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal, and "Anomalisa," a stop-motion animation wonder co-directed by "Adaptation" and "Being John Malkovich" screenwriter Charlie Kaufman.
The very nearly final tally has been tallied. The 51st Chicago International Film Festival opens Thursday with director Nanni Moretti's Italian feature "Mia Madre" at the Auditorium Theatre, a new venue for the festival. Things begin in earnest Friday at its home base, the AMC River East 21, continuing through Oct. 29. This year's roster comprises 144 full-length titles from 58 countries.
Add to that 54 short films arranged in various programs, plus a notably improved series of "Industry Days" panels and events (ranging from how-to-pitch-your-feature seminars to indie distribution workshops), and the cinephiles among us can stay plenty busy for the rest of the month.
Founder and artistic director Michael Kutza, who established this annual event when Lyndon B. Johnson was running the country, frames CIFF as a directors' festival. A director heads up this year's competition jury: Chicago native Andrew Davis, the man who made "The Fugitive."
Filmmakers scheduled to introduce new work at the festival include Kaufman ("Anomalisa"); Atom Egoyan ("Remember"); Michael Moore ("Where to Invade Next"); Laurie Anderson ("Heart of a Dog"); Andrew Haigh ("45 Years"); and Todd Haynes ("Carol").
CIFF programming director Mimi Plauche likes the director-driven focus. "Sometimes the directors (chosen for inclusion) have careers that don't go anywhere," she says. "But sometimes they become major filmmakers on the international scene." Call it the Scorsese Principle. When Kutza gambled on Martin Scorsese's early feature "I Call First," later retitled "Who's That Knocking on My Door?" its maker became a pal of the festival for life.
Alongside Kutza and Plauche, the key programmers of this year's CIFF are Anthony Kaufman, known foremost as a critic (former staffer, current contributor) for indiewire.com. He's overseeing the documentary and U.S. independent feature programs. Camille Lugan serves as curator of the festival's midnight series as well as its shorts component. Both Lugan and Kaufman joined the staff as seasonal employees in 2014, and moved up to programming slots this year.
I spoke to all four programmers this week in Auditorium 18 (like all the other ones, but smaller) at the festival's primary venue, an hour before the AMC River East's first weekday screenings of the customary multiplex fare. Many CIFF titles will be re-playing the very same theater in the coming months, when their commercial releases commence. Dozens more festival titles won't be found anywhere near such a place in their post-festival lives.
This is the great lesson and the valuable reminder of any decent festival. Take a chance on something you don't know, or forever hold your curiosity.
For 51 years, having survived a board coup, precarious finances and the slings and arrows of civic indifference, Kutza's has been the consistent, persistent public face of the festival. He oversees the programming department, and travels to various international festivals — Havana; Berlin; Cannes — on the hunt for festival prospects.
His taste, by his own description, is democratic and "old-fashioned." Sitting in an aisle seat, he flips through a marked-up copy of this year's program. "This one's one of my favorites," he says of "In the Shadow of Women" by Philippe Garrel. It's about a documentary filmmaker torn between his wife and a young intern.
"Mimi says to me, 'How can you like it? It's so old-fashioned!' But I like what it has to say." Flip. "Brooklyn" stars Saoirse Ronan as an Irish immigrant making sense of 1950s New York. "It's a little tough at the beginning to understand what ... they're saying," Kutza says, but it's worth it.
Flip. "45 Years" with Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay, written and directed by Andrew Haigh — "remarkable," says Kutza. "For Grace," the locally sourced doc about the chef behind one of Chicago's hautest restaurants — also remarkable. "I can't afford to eat there, but ... and I mean, talk about your screwed-up lives!" Flip. Isabelle Huppert and Gerard Depardieu in "Valley of Love," derided at Cannes, but in Kutza's estimation, "they're just so good working off each other. Slightly foolish story, but ..."
According to Kutza, CIFF staffers planned this year to split the festival between AMC River East and the Arclight Cinemas anchoring the New City development near North and Clybourn. Construction delays (New City is scheduled to open officially at the end of October) put the squash on that idea. But, Kutza says, "we'll see how it plays out after it opens." He stresses that they're happy where they are, and that the AMC River East location just west of Navy Pier presents big advantages, hotel proximity among them.
Mimi Plauche, Programming Director
In her 10th year, Plauche heads up the competition programming and oversees the rest of the programmers' efforts.
"So," she says. "Here's how it works. Our programming year basically follows the calendar year. In January we open our call for entries, and start getting films immediately. We start watching the submissions," this year totaling 1,500 full-length films and 2,300 shorts. "Then," she says, "we start going to festivals," beginning with Sundance in Park City, Utah, in January.
Plauche attends Gothenburg, Sweden's festival, "a great place to see works in progress," sometimes in 20-minute segments. In February, the massive Berlin film festival is a must, she says, "the place where we really start looking at finished films, both in competition and in the market (non-competition) screenings." Plauche attends the festival in Guadalajara, Mexico, each year, as well as the biggest of the big: Cannes.
CIFF "continues to receive entries throughout the summer," she says. Two of her favorites this year are Philippe Claudel's "A Childhood" from France and, from Iran, Majid Barzegar's "A Very Ordinary Citizen." Plauche professes no love for what she calls "shock cinema," and what others term genre fare. "As a programmer I may be less inclined to appreciate certain types and approaches," she says, "but I recognize the value in them. That's when I'll say, 'Michael, Anthony, Camille, this one isn't for me, but it's worth a look.' It's important to know your own tastes."
Anthony Kaufman, Programmer
After editing the festival catalogue last year Kaufman, a well-established and well-regarded critic for various outlets, moved into the programmer slot for CIFF's U.S. indies and documentaries, in addition to overseeing the "Industry Days" lineup.
Kaufman attends Sundance with both hats on, the critic hat and the programmer hat. It's a look more and more critics, no longer writing full time, are sporting. Kaufman also makes Toronto's Hot Docs festival a priority, and plans to check out the respected True/False festival in Columbia, Mo., for the first time. At the documentary festival in Copenhagen, he says, "which is great, by the way," he caught a particular favorite of his in this year's CIFF lineup: "Double Happiness," in which an Austrian village, down to the cobblestones, is replicated on a forlorn patch of modern-day China. "A wild, almost surreal doc," he says, grinning.
"I keep telling my friends in the press that a lot of what we show (at CIFF), they haven't seen in Toronto. We're pulling from Guadalajara, from Argentina, from all kinds of festivals that aren't necessarily getting coverage ... there are a lot of people in the U.S. press who don't realize what a strong international selection the festival has. There are important discoveries to be made here. And the festival should try to make that better known."
Camille Lugan, Programmer
Lugan, who splits her time between France and America, served as Plauche's intern last year. This year she programmed the "After Dark" slate and the shorts. Like Kaufman, Lugan's duties include shortlisting films for the rest of the programming team to watch. "The team works as a team," she says.
Lugan and Kutza, by her genial estimation, are the programmers most in love with the midnight programming, but the others "respect it as something that should be programmed. And programmed well. My job is to curate eight features that are not only satisfying for the genre audience, but are formally innovative and boundary-pushing in the aesthetic sense."
One of her favorites this year: "Other Madnesses," a cold-call submission from Jeremy Carr, six years in the making and described in the CIFF program as "a modern-day 'Taxi Driver.' " "I put the screener in," Lugan recalls, "and knew nothing in advance. It's shot on low-grade digital video. It was incredibly distressing. But very exciting." Kutza responded strongly as well. And here it is: a small movie that has played a couple of minor festivals, but never a semi-major or major one. Until now.
The very nearly final tally has been tallied. The 51st Chicago International Film Festival opens Thursday with director Nanni Moretti's Italian feature "Mia Madre" at the Auditorium Theatre, a new venue for the festival. Things begin in earnest Friday at its home base, the AMC River East 21, continuing through Oct. 29. This year's roster comprises 144 full-length titles from 58 countries.
Add to that 54 short films arranged in various programs, plus a notably improved series of "Industry Days" panels and events (ranging from how-to-pitch-your-feature seminars to indie distribution workshops), and the cinephiles among us can stay plenty busy for the rest of the month.
Founder and artistic director Michael Kutza, who established this annual event when Lyndon B. Johnson was running the country, frames CIFF as a directors' festival. A director heads up this year's competition jury: Chicago native Andrew Davis, the man who made "The Fugitive."
Filmmakers scheduled to introduce new work at the festival include Kaufman ("Anomalisa"); Atom Egoyan ("Remember"); Michael Moore ("Where to Invade Next"); Laurie Anderson ("Heart of a Dog"); Andrew Haigh ("45 Years"); and Todd Haynes ("Carol").
CIFF programming director Mimi Plauche likes the director-driven focus. "Sometimes the directors (chosen for inclusion) have careers that don't go anywhere," she says. "But sometimes they become major filmmakers on the international scene." Call it the Scorsese Principle. When Kutza gambled on Martin Scorsese's early feature "I Call First," later retitled "Who's That Knocking on My Door?" its maker became a pal of the festival for life.
Alongside Kutza and Plauche, the key programmers of this year's CIFF are Anthony Kaufman, known foremost as a critic (former staffer, current contributor) for indiewire.com. He's overseeing the documentary and U.S. independent feature programs. Camille Lugan serves as curator of the festival's midnight series as well as its shorts component. Both Lugan and Kaufman joined the staff as seasonal employees in 2014, and moved up to programming slots this year.
I spoke to all four programmers this week in Auditorium 18 (like all the other ones, but smaller) at the festival's primary venue, an hour before the AMC River East's first weekday screenings of the customary multiplex fare. Many CIFF titles will be re-playing the very same theater in the coming months, when their commercial releases commence. Dozens more festival titles won't be found anywhere near such a place in their post-festival lives.
This is the great lesson and the valuable reminder of any decent festival. Take a chance on something you don't know, or forever hold your curiosity.
For 51 years, having survived a board coup, precarious finances and the slings and arrows of civic indifference, Kutza's has been the consistent, persistent public face of the festival. He oversees the programming department, and travels to various international festivals — Havana; Berlin; Cannes — on the hunt for festival prospects.
His taste, by his own description, is democratic and "old-fashioned." Sitting in an aisle seat, he flips through a marked-up copy of this year's program. "This one's one of my favorites," he says of "In the Shadow of Women" by Philippe Garrel. It's about a documentary filmmaker torn between his wife and a young intern.
"Mimi says to me, 'How can you like it? It's so old-fashioned!' But I like what it has to say." Flip. "Brooklyn" stars Saoirse Ronan as an Irish immigrant making sense of 1950s New York. "It's a little tough at the beginning to understand what ... they're saying," Kutza says, but it's worth it.
Flip. "45 Years" with Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay, written and directed by Andrew Haigh — "remarkable," says Kutza. "For Grace," the locally sourced doc about the chef behind one of Chicago's hautest restaurants — also remarkable. "I can't afford to eat there, but ... and I mean, talk about your screwed-up lives!" Flip. Isabelle Huppert and Gerard Depardieu in "Valley of Love," derided at Cannes, but in Kutza's estimation, "they're just so good working off each other. Slightly foolish story, but ..."
According to Kutza, CIFF staffers planned this year to split the festival between AMC River East and the Arclight Cinemas anchoring the New City development near North and Clybourn. Construction delays (New City is scheduled to open officially at the end of October) put the squash on that idea. But, Kutza says, "we'll see how it plays out after it opens." He stresses that they're happy where they are, and that the AMC River East location just west of Navy Pier presents big advantages, hotel proximity among them.
Mimi Plauche, Programming Director
In her 10th year, Plauche heads up the competition programming and oversees the rest of the programmers' efforts.
"So," she says. "Here's how it works. Our programming year basically follows the calendar year. In January we open our call for entries, and start getting films immediately. We start watching the submissions," this year totaling 1,500 full-length films and 2,300 shorts. "Then," she says, "we start going to festivals," beginning with Sundance in Park City, Utah, in January.
Plauche attends Gothenburg, Sweden's festival, "a great place to see works in progress," sometimes in 20-minute segments. In February, the massive Berlin film festival is a must, she says, "the place where we really start looking at finished films, both in competition and in the market (non-competition) screenings." Plauche attends the festival in Guadalajara, Mexico, each year, as well as the biggest of the big: Cannes.
CIFF "continues to receive entries throughout the summer," she says. Two of her favorites this year are Philippe Claudel's "A Childhood" from France and, from Iran, Majid Barzegar's "A Very Ordinary Citizen." Plauche professes no love for what she calls "shock cinema," and what others term genre fare. "As a programmer I may be less inclined to appreciate certain types and approaches," she says, "but I recognize the value in them. That's when I'll say, 'Michael, Anthony, Camille, this one isn't for me, but it's worth a look.' It's important to know your own tastes."
Anthony Kaufman, Programmer
After editing the festival catalogue last year Kaufman, a well-established and well-regarded critic for various outlets, moved into the programmer slot for CIFF's U.S. indies and documentaries, in addition to overseeing the "Industry Days" lineup.
Kaufman attends Sundance with both hats on, the critic hat and the programmer hat. It's a look more and more critics, no longer writing full time, are sporting. Kaufman also makes Toronto's Hot Docs festival a priority, and plans to check out the respected True/False festival in Columbia, Mo., for the first time. At the documentary festival in Copenhagen, he says, "which is great, by the way," he caught a particular favorite of his in this year's CIFF lineup: "Double Happiness," in which an Austrian village, down to the cobblestones, is replicated on a forlorn patch of modern-day China. "A wild, almost surreal doc," he says, grinning.
"I keep telling my friends in the press that a lot of what we show (at CIFF), they haven't seen in Toronto. We're pulling from Guadalajara, from Argentina, from all kinds of festivals that aren't necessarily getting coverage ... there are a lot of people in the U.S. press who don't realize what a strong international selection the festival has. There are important discoveries to be made here. And the festival should try to make that better known."
Camille Lugan, Programmer
Lugan, who splits her time between France and America, served as Plauche's intern last year. This year she programmed the "After Dark" slate and the shorts. Like Kaufman, Lugan's duties include shortlisting films for the rest of the programming team to watch. "The team works as a team," she says.
Lugan and Kutza, by her genial estimation, are the programmers most in love with the midnight programming, but the others "respect it as something that should be programmed. And programmed well. My job is to curate eight features that are not only satisfying for the genre audience, but are formally innovative and boundary-pushing in the aesthetic sense."
One of her favorites this year: "Other Madnesses," a cold-call submission from Jeremy Carr, six years in the making and described in the CIFF program as "a modern-day 'Taxi Driver.' " "I put the screener in," Lugan recalls, "and knew nothing in advance. It's shot on low-grade digital video. It was incredibly distressing. But very exciting." Kutza responded strongly as well. And here it is: a small movie that has played a couple of minor festivals, but never a semi-major or major one. Until now.
About JULIA
![]({"default":{"load":"default","w":"80","h":"45","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB18n5uX.img?h=450&w=799&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f&x=531&y=285"},"size3column":{"load":"default","w":"62","h":"35","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB18n5uX.img?h=351&w=624&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f&x=531&y=285"},"size2column":{"load":"default","w":"62","h":"35","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB18n5uX.img?h=351&w=624&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f&x=531&y=285"}})
![]({"default":{"load":"default","w":"80","h":"45","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB18kEvi.img?h=450&w=799&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f&x=650&y=332"},"size3column":{"load":"default","w":"62","h":"35","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB18kEvi.img?h=351&w=624&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f&x=650&y=332"},"size2column":{"load":"default","w":"62","h":"35","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB18kEvi.img?h=351&w=624&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f&x=650&y=332"}})
Blogger Comment
Facebook Comment