The Chicago International Film Festival

The Chicago International Film Festival is in its 44th year, and I’ve been attending screenings for four of the six seasons I’ve lived in Chicago. For a somewhat eccentric and generally ignored festival, I’ve seen some really interesting films in the past few years - The Taste of Tea, Kontroll, The Machinist, and The Savages are a few highlights – and I’ve come to see the festival as an opportunity to see foreign films, along with a few interesting domestic ones, months ahead of Chicago’s sometimes glacial independent theater release schedule. (Jeebus, sometimes I really miss L.A.)

Ahem. In any case, this year I’m going to try to see a few more films than the 2 or 3 that I usually get to, so over the next two weeks, you should see reviews of movies to watch out for (for good or ill) when they finally hit theaters or rental places near you. So far, I have tickets for Deepa Mehta’s new film, Heaven on Earth, the controversial Italian Mafia movie, Gomorrah* (the author has a hit out on him!), Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata, and El Norte, a third cinema film I’ve been hearing about for years, and will finally have the opportunity to see. I’m hoping to pick up a few more tickets as I go, but I’ve unfortunately already missed a few things, like Wendy and Lucy and The Good, the Bad, and the Weird, that I really wanted to see. Such is the nature of festivals, I suppose.

*Sadly, I missed Gommorah, due to a wicked hangover. It happens.