The Circuit

Anton Corbijn's "Control" won the Audience Award at the Chicago International Film Festival, after it landed the fest's Silver Hugo Award for best screenplay and best actor.  Carlos Ruíz Ruíz and Mariem Pérez Riera "Lovesickness" and Jon Dunham's doc "Spirit of the Marathon" took second and third place.

by Lisa Nesselson
The Chicago Reader's Jonathan Rosenbaum rephrases his bizarre animosity toward the fest every October, blaming the event for not having the alleged programming vision of celluloid shindigs in Toronto, Berlin, Venice and Cannes.  The charge is, for the most part, ludicrous.

Sometimes never having heard of a film or its maker IS a warning sign but it can also be a harbinger of authentic discovery.  The fest reinforces this with its New Directors competition.  In addition, there were 17 first features in the non-competitive World Cinema section.

Ebert, who says "It was at the Chicago International Film Festival that I first saw films by Scorsese, Fassbinder, Nava and other future giants," posited some years back that, had the city cared more, Chicago should have grown to hold the slot that the much younger Toronto now enjoys.

The fest's board dreams of a permanent year-'round home, which shouldn't be a problem -- but apparently is -- in a city that can't tear down its remaining movie palaces fast enough and whose rabid construction of luxury condos has peppered the landscape with more cranes than a Japanese print.

The educational outreach division of Cinema/Chicago does an outstanding job of sensitizing Chicago area students to films they would not otherwise see.

"Chicago 10" stirred up lively discussion since many audience members had lived through the period so vividly depicted by proudly protective scripter, helmer and co-producer Brett Morgen, who acted out most of the courtroom reenactments for the film's motion-capture based animation segments. Morgen, who was born in the year of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, said that comments at screenings for high school audiences proved the hybrid doc's revisiting of anti-war activism is relevant for contemporary audiences of all ages.

by Lisa Nesselson
Book-ended by gala presentations of Marc Forster's "The Kite Runner" and Tamara Jenkins' "The Savages," and dedicated to Roger Ebert, the 43rd Chicago International Film Festival (Oct 4 - 17) offered a high ratio of worthwhile fare across its 150 feature-length titles, with a particularly strong documentary line-up.

Founder and artistic director Michael Kutza stands alone in the longevity stakes among fest honchos; he not only started the event when barely past 20 -- donning glasses he didn't actually need in order to look older -- he also tapped into his graphic design skills to create the fest's distinctive Theda Bara logo.

Ebert, recently named the nation's top pundit by Forbes magazine, signed on as film critic at the Chicago Sun-Times just a few years later.

The late silent film star Colleen Moore, who launched the fest with Kutza in 1964 and was instrumental in getting Hollywood vets to attend early editions, was the perky heroine of special presentation "Her Wild Oat" (1927) on this year's opening weekend.  Long thought lost, a print surfaced in Prague in 2001 and the lively comedy of mistaken identity was restored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, working from Czech intertitles.

An audience-friendly, non-industry urban celebration held primarily in two commercial multiplexes, the Chicago Film Festival is about as far away from a market climate as one can get. But sales agent Claude Nouchi, a repeat visitor and main jury member, reported seeing several films he thought he could represent in his native France and beyond.

During the fest-heavy autumn, print traffic problems seem as intractable as the so-called superbugs that don't respond to penicillin.  As a precaution, Hungarian helmer Bollok Csaba arrived with a subtitled DVD of his "Iska's Journey," a title so popular on the fest circuit that half of it was stalled in Israel and the other half had been shipped to Germany.

Helmers and distribs have told fest organizers "Whatever you do, don't use..." followed by their least favorite of the major international shippers: FedEx, DHL, UPS.  But digital and disc-based screenings are no panacea, as a handful of titles were not downloaded to the correct location or discs proved temperamental.  Still, with films from 44 countries in the line-up, glitches seem to go with the territory.

And despite many late-arriving prints being rescheduled on short notice, the fest fared better on the logistics front than the 45,000-runner Chicago Marathon (Oct 7) which was halted after a few hours for the first time in it's 30 year history due to life-threatening unseasonal heat.

The Chicago International Film Festival will open with Marc Forster's "The Kite Runner."  The film made other news today as NPR reports there are growing concerns about the film, particularly in Afghanistan.  Parents of the children starring in the film, and still living in Kabul, began to fear for their safety after they learned of scenes involving child sexual abuse.  Now that illegal DVDs are hitting their street, they fear reprisals and a deep, long-lasting stigma.

Download Chicago's lineup here.