Gem Hunting: The 2022 Chicago International Film Festival
Coming out of a screening of a new film by Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, I bumped into a Chicago film critic who I’ve known for a few years. The 58th Annual Chicago International Film Festival was happening and we both attended a number of screenings for it. He’s one of the people I expect to bump into several times over the course of the festival. He was planning to write about the movie as was I and we talked about it as we shared a brief train ride.
The most beloved Iranian films have always had a minimalism and naturalism to them and this has stemmed, I believe, from the attitudes of Iran’s most prolific filmmakers regarding movies. The interplay between reality and fiction, professional and non-professional actors, deliberation and happenstance, is always rich and provocative - one of many reasons I have a personal affinity for Irani cinema. Cameras change lives in many of the works of the nation’s more notable directors. It’s almost as if this society sees the act of filming as sacred. The camera and whatever it films becomes sacred.
But this new Panahi film, which is called No Bears, felt like a rebuke to that theory. The presence of cameras in the film - wielded by the filmmaker who stars in the film as himself - only seems to cause trouble. The camera’s presence in the rural setting is like an agent of destruction. It causes violence and unrest. Utilizing it is looked at as cheapening life. My critic friend doesn’t agree. He argues it’s the people who wreck everything. The rural inhabitants the filmmaker encounters, with their superstitions, constricting customs, toxic gossip and warped values are what set about the chain of events that leads to a tragic outcome in Panahi’s film. And on second thought, I think he’s actually right.
No Bears - Dir: Jafar Panahi
No Bears is Panahi’s fifth film made under lockdown. For doing what an artist does, Panahi has been charged by the Irani government with producing anti-government propaganda. He was arrested in 2010 and slapped with a six year prison sentence and a 20 year ban on making films. The films he has made and smuggled out under this ban have gone on to win numerous awards at film festivals, while calling attention to his predicament as an important artist at odds with a theocratic authoritarian regime.
So this new feature, whose existence is a brave act of protest, seems more pessimistic about hope for the nation as the previous efforts have been. But it's a beautifully articulated cry of rage from the filmmaker about the direction in which his country and its citizens are headed. And it was in talking to this peer of mine that I realized that that sentiment is fairly consistent across the 21 features I’ve been able to see at this year’s festival.
The world is not in good shape. Authoritarian and fascist governments are asserting their power more aggressively, stealing elections, suppressing their own populations and the truth, and expanding their reach wherever possible. It’s making life miserable for decent people. The world has a fascism problem. Based on the cross section of what I’m seeing - which is as much as my schedule will allow - this is the most consistent emotional or political through-line I can detect. It’s bad out there. Our species is in self-imposed bondage, to the approval of enough of the deluded and morally deficient to allow dictatorships to take power. So the existence of many of these films, which are each rebellious against that suppression in some way, can function as a means of lifting the relatively impoverished discourse about this fascism up into a more thoughtful, humane and provocative dimension. That makes it important.
I always attend the festival in some capacity. It’s my big once-in-a-year event. In the past, I’ve attended as many as 38 screenings. As festival editions go, one always tends to see a substantial amount of social protest against many forms of injustice (legal, political, emotional, racial, spiritual) in the entries that come out of dozens of different countries worldwide. This artform is a language for speaking to us about the human condition. But I can’t remember a festival edition with so little else on its mind aside from the multifaceted hegemonies people around the world are facing from these tyrannies everyday, and the effect they’re having on people. Festival programmers have to balance relating this urgency with offering other kinds of fare, which can’t be an easy feat. Here’s a rundown of what I’ve seen:
Two films about the struggles of rural farmers: Carla Simón’s Alcarrás focused on a farm family coming to terms with the looming sale of their land to developers. The approaching of an event that changes their lives, uniting the three generations living on the land, is conveyed in the film’s penultimate shot. Li Ruijun’s extraordinary Return To Dust, about two resilient farmers in the Chinese countryside, is something I hope finds a major distributor. I can’t remember having seen a film that depicted what it is to work. This is a film that painstakingly champions the dignity of work, the reward of work, the nobility of self-sufficiency, and the threats it faces from the uncaring State. It’s a Marxist masterpiece.
Alcarrás - Dir: Carla Simón
Return To Dust - Dir: Li Ruijun
The features Chile 1976 and the Romananian Metronom, both examining life under brutal regimes in the past - Pinochet’s murderous dictatorship in the former and that of Ceaușescu in the latter, had explicit connections to the present situations. Despite being undeniably gripping, I responded more actively and more readily to non-fictional, essayistic illustrations of these oppressions.
Sergei Loznitsa’s WW2 compendium, The Natural History of Destruction, brilliantly told a story of the ravages of war by appropriating archival footage into a series of sequences which told that story. We see footage from the mid 1930’s of pleasant pre-war life in Germany, Poland, France and Britain, followed by chilling aerial footage of cities and countrysides being bombed at night, the fires lighting up the landscape like lights on a Christmas tree. A tapestry of unnarrated, decontextualized footage, with no single nation privileged, tells a simple and profound story. We see structural devastations in Hamburg, aircraft constructions in both Germany and Britain, a morale-boosting speech by an English officer to a group of aircraft mechanics, countless bombs being loaded onto American planes. Civilian populations do all the work of warfare, and then they’re the ones killed en masse during wartime.
Mark Cousins, whose introspective essays on art and location, narrated in his seductive Irish brogue, are must-see festival items for me, scored big with The March on Rome. He plumbs Italy’s film archives to craft a thoughtful and evocative examination of the way Mussolini’s blackshirt facist uprising used the new medium of filmmaking to distort, exaggerate and lie its way into power. We see the way the future regime’s tricks with editing, camera placement and continuity were crucial tools for creating the first 20th century model for manipulating the masses and manufacturing consent that would prove useful in subsequent fascist con jobs throughout the world. Cousins’ work always fascinates me, but this one blew me away. As a breakdown of how would-be dictatorships use images and media to hammer home their fear-mongering agendas, this is essential viewing.
The March on Rome - Dir: Mark Cousins
I shouldn’t forget to mention Veronika Liskova’s The Visitors as a smaller scale entry in the festival's documentary program that plays like a microcosm of the situations facing communities and nations around the world today. The director documented the period spent by a Czech anthropologist living in Svalbard as she interviewed the residents in the remote community of 2500 on the Norwegian archipelago. The area is seeing its existence threatened by both climate change and a backlash against its open border immigration policy. In the Q&A after the film, Liskova was very forthcoming about the dramatic changes in the mindset of the people living in this isolated community and how no community is safe from the scourge of bureaucracy and anti-immigrant rhetoric.
The festival’s support of female filmmakers (among other traditionally less visible demographics) was evident in the number of directors who introduced screenings of their films and took questions afterwards. Their increased prevalence is an energizing thing to see. Erige Sehiri was present to talk about the leisurely and almost pantheistic way she went about filming Under The Fig Trees, which depicts a day in the life of Tunisian fig pickers and the squabbles, flirtations and connections taking place among sharply contrasting generations and backgrounds. Sehiri was able to get beautifully naturalistic performances from her non-professional cast.
Under The Fig Trees - Dir: Erige Sehiri
I sensed in Quebecois filmmaker Charlotte Le Bon’s Falcon Lake something more than a coming of age story in her film about a 14-year-old boy’s attraction to an older girl while vacationing with his family. There are moments when it felt like she wanted to make a horror film and an element of the supernatural hangs over her whole production. Her young cast are exceptionally resourceful and I’m glad she was there to share her insight about the horror influence.
One of my favorite films of the festival was Runner, which appears to take place in a past that looks out of time, within dilapidated, antique locations that are so powerful and tangible it’s easy to overlook the simple power of the story. Director Marian Mathias, whose passion in scouting the authentic midwest locations was noticeable in every frame, finds dark gray skies prettier than sunny blue ones, like me. The film is like a gallery of moving Wyeth paintings, with the dreamy glumness of Bela Tarr, Kelly Reichart or Terrence Malick. It’s a remarkable debut and I hope it finds a distributor.
Not all sorry-state-of-the-world movies were downbeat. There was the Finnish oddball entry The Woodcutter’s Tale, directed by Mikko Myllylahti, which continued the tradition of Scandinavian absurdism one might associate with Aki Kaurismäki or Roy Andersson. Its metaphorical ponderings on the meaninglessness of existence, illustrated with some wildly original imagery and delivered with deadpan seriousness, may endear it to readers of existential philosophy.
The Woodcutter’s Tale - Dir: Mikko Myllylahti
Palestine’s Mediterranean Fever also approached a grave subject with a darkly comic edge. A failed writer, wracked by severe depression, befriends his obnoxious neighbor and is fascinated by his ties to organized crime. The way his obsession with the criminal element bleeds into his family life gives the whole thing the feel of a Sopranos episode in its mixture of comedy and human horror. He even goes to see a therapist.
Nor could I ignore the features on the festival’s After Dark program. This category is reserved for the more nasty or bizarre items in a given year’s edition. Horror and Sci-Fi films, or films that simply defy categorization go here. In weaker festivals, these features may be the most stylistically interesting or daring entries being offered. I enjoyed the nutty invention of Travis Stevens’ A Wounded Fawn, despite some of its less successful elements, like a final shot that overstays its welcome.
And there was a big-screen update of Ultraman that I couldn’t miss. Shin Ultraman’s screening was preceded by two episodes of the original tokkusatsu TV series, which made for a real treat. The way director Shenji Higuchi uses forced perspectives and extreme low angles to convey size differences was an interesting way to suggest international cold war standoffs. As social commentaries go, it does for global politics in the nuclear era what 2016’s Shin Godzilla did for Japanese bureaucracy following the Fukushima nuclear disaster. It’s also every bit as earnestly absurd, perverted, hilarious and inventive as you’d expect it to be.
Shin Ultraman - Dir: Shenji Higuchi
The most joy for me at the festival came from two music-related documentaries. There was Sasha Jenkins’ documentary Louis Armstrong: Black and Blue. It’s an exuberant and candid biography of one of the most important and influential artists this country ever produced, lively with stories and anecdotes. Clips from uninhibited recordings Armstrong made in his home often find him very lucid about the prejudice his celebrity didn’t shield him from. Many of his best and most ornery quotations are delivered like newspaper headlines landing on a collage project not dissimilar to the ones Armstrong made in his spare time.
Then there was If These Walls Could Sing, which will hit the Disney Plus platform later this year. The legendary history of Abbey Road Studios is explored by Paul McCartney’s daughter, Mary, who all but lived in the studio during her early life. She may be the only person who can produce such a document about this almost sacred space.
Anything Beatles makes me smile, but I had no idea so many other artists recorded there. This film was exactly what I needed.
If These Walls Could Sing - Dir: Mary McCartney
As a fan of the nutty, subversive counterculture comedies of Robert Downey, I was looking forward to Chris Smith’s Sr. (which will hit Netflix) and although I thought we spent a little too much time with Robert Jr, who in his restless energy seems to be always “on”, the focus is on their relationship not only as family members but as artists. Jr. and his own young son visit his sardonic dad, bedridden from Parkinson’s, for what he suspects will be the final time. Even then, his father - a born filmmaker to the very end - seems to see everything in terms of how good the footage for the movie will turn out. It’s a very moving scene.
My two favorite moments in festival features this year: A moment near the very end of Albert Serra’s challenging and enigmatic Pacifiction. Serra is interested more in evoking moods and states of being than telling stories and his long and involving global red flag of a movie culminates in a scene featuring a kind of farewell party for naval officers in a Polynesian nightclub. We only have scant details about what will happen the following day, as we see things from the limited perspective of a suave local power broker named De Roller (Benoît Magimel) but the tragically goofy behavior of the soldiers and their commanding officers somehow hints at the idea that the world will never be the same without explicitly saying anything. Serra seems to be in Werner Herzog territory here. My favorite sensation while watching a movie is to have my heart racing and be totally unsure why.
Pacifiction - Dir: Albert Serra
The other such moment comes in Laura Poitras’s triumphant All The Beauty and The Bloodshed. Part biography, part protest journal, Poitras’s masterfully constructed documentary introduces us to Nan Goldin, whose highly influential art and photography installations in the 70’s and 80’s showed the world the vibrant and tragic underbelly of New York’s underground queer scene. Then it switches to show Goldin’s work with P.A.I.N, an activist group she founded for aiding victims of the opioid crisis. Pissed off and determined as ever, she leads protests at the world’s most prominent art museums against the Sackler family, whose Purdue Pharmaceutical company is responsible for the production and distribution of dangerous narcotic prescriptions like Oxycontin. The family uses their status as art patrons to launder their reputations and getting the Sackler name off the entrances to museum wings is only the first step in Goldin’s mission. There’s a scene late in the film involving a direct address to the culprit family by the opioid victims and their loved ones that’s truly harrowing. Never do you expect to see the people at the top of a monstrous corporate entity having to face the people at the opposite end of the ladder of power whose lives are destroyed. No stranger to persecution by the powerful herself, Poitras should get an Oscar nomination on the basis of this scene alone. It’s an astounding cinematic moment.
All The Beauty and The Bloodshed - Dir: Laura Poitras
But then the festival is always a bracing experience for me. I feel enriched by stories, connected to the world, to the otherness and to all of those who share my feelings. To those who share our political challenges in this country and around the world. I’m moved, enlightened, informed, connected and lifted up. As a moviegoing experience, this does so much more for me than watching stale IP retreads squirm around on screen for a few hours (the Knives Out sequel is this year’s festival centerpiece, however). Typically I avoid the pricier special presentations and celebrity appearances in the program. I wait to see those features with established directors and famous actors because many of these films have long since acquired distribution and will be in theaters eventually. So I won’t sweat this year missing new films from Darren Arononfsky, Martin McDonough, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Sam Mendes, Sarah Polley, Christian Mungiu, Park Chan-Wook or Noah Baumbach. I will catch up with them eventually.
I’m looking for hidden gems, new talents and unexpected surprises and each year, I always find a few, even as we live in a world where Jafar Panahi, whom the Irani regime sees as a criminal, will actually have to serve his six year prison term for the crime of making independent, uncommissioned art. Let’s continue to enjoy the festival circuit on behalf of all those like him.
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