2023 Chicago Int’l Film Fest: From Ukraine documentary to Michael Shannon debut, movies you’ll remember
CHICAGO — Talk to three different festival programmers, even if they’re working on the same festival, and you’ll get three different ideas of what’s on the minds of filmmakers whose work fills the 59th Chicago International Film Festival, opening Oct. 11.
For CIFF artistic director Mimi Plauché, the word “rights” covers a lot of the thematic ground this year. “Human rights, political rights, women’s rights — this huge question of what is one individual’s place in the system?” Many of the filmmakers represented in this year’s festival, she says, burrow into larger questions by “drawing us into the dreams of their characters.”
For senior programmer Anthony Kaufman, a specialist in the world documentary scene, the word “context” emerges as a key to the best work he has sifted through this year. One of the upcoming CIFF standout titles, in any category, the Polish doc “In the Rearview” captures a side of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in a way no other film on the subject — Kaufman says he’s seen nine or 10 Ukraine war nonfiction films this year alone — has managed.
“The first round of Ukrainian docs,” he says, “gave us the assault of the war, but without much context, and in many cases without human stories. I guess you’d say the earlier ones focused less on style and more on blunt impact, the sheer violence of it all.”
“In the Rearview” operates differently, with no less cumulative impact. Born in Poland, the debut feature-length filmmaker Maciek Hamela bought a van and began evacuating Ukrainian citizens from their ravaged homeland over the Polish border. He then bought two more vans and hired a camera operator. The camera for the most part stays in place, between the two front seats, recording the conversations, behavior and remarkable insights of one vanful of refugees, then another, and another.
The threat of death looms along so much of the roads taken here: some are mined, others are impassably muddy. But when the calmly astonishing 84 minutes of “In the Rearview” is done, you, the viewer, has a deeper understanding of the effects and the fallout of what 15 million displaced Ukrainian have endured.
And now a little context regarding the festival itself.
CIFF has relocated its primary venue this year, from the AMC River East location in downtown’s Streeterville neighborhood to the AMC NewCity 14 in the Goose Island neighborhood, near the North and Clybourn intersection.
For one thing, says CIFF programmer Sam Flancher, it’s a step up for moviegoers using public transit. “It’s a block off the CTA Red Line stop at North and Clybourn, and the Red Line also gets you easily to the Gene Siskel Film Center and to the Music Box Theatre.” The festival also returns to both those venues, and other locations. Two brand-new screening locations for CIFF this year: Harrison Park’s Chicago Park District fieldhouse in Pilsen, and the University of Chicago’s Logan Center for the Arts in Hyde Park.
Prepping for Chicago’s festival selections, Flancher joined Plauché for the annual scouting excursions to two of the world’s largest and most prestigious film festivals in Berlin (February) and Cannes (May). Over his decade with CIFF, in various roles, Flancher says he has learned to “trust my gut instinct about a film, even if I can’t quite put into words why the film has stayed in my head.” We’ll call that word “gut” as Flancher’s programming search term, to go with Plauché’s “rights” and Kaufman’s “context.”
Says Flancher: “I realize now that if I’m thinking about a scene or even just a moment from a film throughout the day, that probably means other people will, too.”
The films filling NewCity’s auditoriums at the 2023 festival cover the global waterfront, with plenty of high-profile favorites already successful on the international festival circuit. Most of those titles, such as Jonathan Glazer’s remarkable adaptation of the Martin Amis Auschwitz novel “The Zone of Interest,” have North American distributors (A24 for “Zone of Interest”) and a theatrical release date on the books (Dec. 8).
Late and starry additions to this year’s CIFF slate include Alexander Payne’s comedy “The Holdovers” (Paul Giamatti as a crotchety New England boarding school professor); David Fincher’s “The Killer” (Michael Fassbender in a larky assassination thriller) and debut feature filmmaker Cord Jefferson’s satire on race and culture, “American Fiction,” the audience award winner at this year’s Toronto festival (Jeffrey Wright as a novelist under extreme pressure).
Other films — the heavy majority of CIFF’s 100-plus feature-length offerings — represent what lies beneath the conspicuous tip of the marketing iceberg. There’s a healthy Chicago component to the slate. The documentary “Bike Vessel,” about a father-son ride from St. Louis to Chicago, explores issues of health and wellness in the Black community, and already is nearing sellout status in advance ticket sales for its CIFF screenings. Chicago-area native Haroula Rose’s sophomore feature, the comedy “All Happy Families,” will bring Rose back to town from Los Angeles, for (among other things) the first Industry Days panel devoted to local filmmaking.
That panel (4 p.m. Oct. 12, at NewCity 14) also features filmmaker Jennifer Reeder (“Perpetrator”); “The Bear” unit production manager Carrie Holt de Lama; and writer-director Minhal Baig, whose supple feature debut “We Grown Now,” set in 1992 in the Cabrini-Green housing projects, opens the festival at the Music Box Oct. 11.
There’s so much more, all I can say, really, is “there’s so much more.” Michael Shannon’s feature directorial debut, the meticulous and unnerving “Eric LaRue” (starring Judy Greer in screenwriter Brett Neveu’s adaptation of his own play), will screen at the festival. Shannon will also hold a master class as part of the CIFF Industry Days events, this one at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
CIFF programmer Flancher would like to add this public service announcement: See the mainstream movies previewing at the festival if you must. Your “Killer,” or your “Holdovers.” But by all means, take a few chances on films you don’t know much, or anything, about. Such as?
Well, such as “Family Portrait.” This unassuming independent project from writer-director Lucy Kerr, another feature debut, takes place early in 2022, when the pandemic was a new, wondrous and presumably easy-to-tame, easy-to-vaccinate-the-vast-majority-of-the-populace thing.
A Texas family has gathered for its annual family portrait; Deragh Campbell, scheduled to attend the CIFF screening, plays one daughter who arrives with new boyfriend in tow. To understate, some members of her family are treating this pesky COVID situation more lightly than others. And with this skeletal premise, Kerr addresses a lot, in under 80 minutes, that Flancher says earlier movies about COVID couldn’t address without overstatement or undercooked generalities.
“We’ve seen so many really poor movies about the pandemic,” he says, “trying to capture the anxiety of those early days. But this one’s a potent distillation of what that actually felt like. It’s a small film with a lot of vision.”
What the programmers share, this year and every year, is the belief in providing the widest array of cinematic viewpoints available. “That’s the approach we take,” Plauché says. “Understanding cinema as an art form, but also understanding cinema as a way of expanding our worldview. We’re all interested in a wider view of the world we live in. And in understanding how people live.”
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Chicago International Film Festival, Oct. 11-22. Main venue is AMC NewCity 14, 1500 N. Clybourn Ave. For complete schedule and all venue locations, go to chicagofilmfestival.com.
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