This year, Chicago Filmmakers celebrates its 50th anniversary, a landmark achievement in the history of any nonprofit, let alone one focused on the cinematic arts.
Author Archives: Kat Sachs
Posted inFilm
Review: Our Body
The political is found firsthand to be personal, here through an assemblage of intimate vignettes, and thus it becomes all the more impactful when the director joins the ranks, a stand-in for our collective body.
Posted inFilm
Solidarity in the summer
As has been the case for most of my adult life, I’ve also watched a lot of movies (and occasionally, some television) this summer. What’s been different this year is that I’m now thinking more about those who made what I’m watching, both in front of and behind the camera.
Posted inFilm
No easy answers
“A String of Pearls: The Films of Camille Billops & James Hatch” is a complete retrospective of their film work, the first-ever in Chicago.
Posted inFilm
A local industry renaissance
Film and television production in Chicago still lacks the resources, glamour, and consistency of opportunity found on the coasts—but you can’t build Chicago’s community and authenticity in a Hollywood hangar.
Posted inFilm
Review: Scarlet
Filmed in Super 16mm like its predecessor—and also including colorized archival footage that adds to its sense of realism and rapture—this sparkles especially with intimate feeling and pure affection for the craft.
Posted inFilm, Movie Feature
Doesn’t anyone fuck anymore?
Will No Hard Feelings revive the sex comedy? Probably not. Has it at least revolutionized the subgenre, bringing something heretofore unseen to the summer slate? Maybe . . .
Posted inNews & Politics
Trans elders are revolutionaries
The following five profiles feature trans and genderqueer elders in Chicago as they reflect on identity and joy this Pride Month.
Posted inFilm
Review: The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future
Rife with evocative symbolism, Chilean director Francisca Alegria’s feature debut is an audacious, surrealistic expression of acute ecological distress and various ideas pertaining to contemporary agita.
Posted inFilm
Review: The Quiet Epidemic
The Quiet Epidemic is no cinematic masterpiece—ultimately it’s more about advocacy, with calls to action on how to support the community, than it is about any kind of aesthetic rigor. But it’s hard to deny that CLD and the controversy surrounding it evoke many existential questions about the reality of suffering that are best served by this particular medium.
Posted inFilm
Review: Waiting for the Light to Change
DePaul alumna Linh Tran’s feature debut considers the liminal period in a person’s life that is their early 20s, when the future is seemingly far ahead but still so near.
Posted inFilm
Explore the blessings of cinema with Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Between Monday, April 24, and Friday, April 28, Apichatpong Weerasethakul will again appear in person, this time at several screenings of his films (most on 35-millimeter) between Block Cinema at Northwestern University and the Gene Siskel Film Center.
Posted inFilm
The Chicago Film Society fulfills tomorrow’s promises
“I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.” —Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra Just three minutes into Edward Owens’s Autre Fois J’ai Aimé Une Femme (1966), the screen goes dark. It stays that way for […]
Posted inBest of Chicago
Best film series that interrogates the meaning of ‘high art’
“Cinema was born with the intention to fulfill the needs of spectacle for the working classes—the mainstream.” So exclaims the thesis posted to the metaphorical door that’s the Music Box Theatre website. “Yet, as time pressed on, and the cinematic form grew, so did the separation of cinema from its origins, from the people and […]
Posted inBest of Chicago
Best annual collaboration between local filmmakers and musicians
Some things may happen annually, but that doesn’t make them any less exciting. The CFA Media Mixer is one such event. Started in 2012, the Media Mixer—put on by Chicago Film Archives (CFA)—brings together local filmmakers and musicians to make an original work out of footage from the Archives’ immense collection of ephemera concentrated on […]