The 24th Chicago International Film Festival, running from Monday, October 24, through Sunday, November 6, promises fewer programs this year–a little less than 100 versus last year’s 131–with a good many more repeats; and the screenings occupy a much wider geographic spread, with films showing on the University of Chicago campus and at the Three Penny as well as at the two standbys from last year, the Biograph and the Music Box. Although some countries are unrepresented–including the People’s Republic of China, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Korea, Mexico, and most of Africa and the Middle East–the overall international spread (or sprawl) is as far-flung as ever, including such unlikely coproductions as Rowing With the Wind (Spanish/Norwegian in English) and Consuelo, an Illusion (Chilean/Swedish). The festival is also broadening its plans for question-and-answer sessions with directors after their films; specifics will be announced at the relevant screenings.
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Like last year’s selection, the films on offer, taken as an unwieldy whole, make up an indigestible hodgepodge, reflecting neither a critical position nor an all-purpose cornucopia. (A total absence of retrospectives–apart from an Alan Parker tribute, which is surely the last thing that we need–is especially striking and unfortunate.) But there are still clearly a number of things worth seeing. Two of the best films that were originally selected, Terence Davies’s Distant Voices/Still Lives and Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Thou Shalt Not Kill (also known as A Short Film About Killing), have been withdrawn by their recently acquired American distributors, but at least this means that we’ll be able to see them in Chicago eventually.
A few films that I haven’t seen but have heard encouraging things about are Theo Angelopoulos’s Greek Landscape in the Mist, Joao Botelho’s Portuguese Hard Times (adapted from the Dickens novel), Christine Edzard’s English six-hour Little Dorrit (ditto), Ken Russell’s English (and campy) The Lair of the White Worm, Raul Ruiz’s half-hour episode in the French/Swedish Ice Breaker, Serguei Soloviev’s Soviet Assa, and Francisco J. Lombardi’s Peruvian In the Mouth of the Wolf, the last three will receive only single screenings.
