The fourth annual Chicago Anarchist Film Festival continues Friday through Sunday, May 2 through 4. Screenings will be at Buddy, 1542 N. Milwaukee, second floor. Suggested donation is $5, and all films will be shown by video projection; for more information call 773-862-1011.
FRIDAY, MAY 2
Culture + Community
Four documentaries: Coleman Romalis’s Emma Goldman: The Anarchist Guest (2000, 42 min.), a Canadian profile of the legendary activist; Hope Tucker’s Queen of the Loop (2000, 30 min.), about women bike messengers in Chicago; Tomas McCabe and Andrei Rozen’s Bum’s Paradise (2002, 53 min.), a look at the homeless people who colonized a peninsular landfill on San Francisco Bay; Vicky Cervantes’s Radio Campesino (12 min.), about Chicago activists creating a radio station in Honduras; and Ben Unwin’s Well Done, Now Sod Off (2000, 85 min.), about Chumbawamba, the British punk ensemble that unexpectedly became a multiplatinum-selling pop act. (6:30)
SATURDAY, MAY 3
Movements + Rebellion
Peter Kutt-ner, Cindi Moran, and Eric Scholl’s The End of the Nightstick: Confronting Police Brutality in Chicago (1993, 43 min.) is a chilling, informative video documentary about police brutality in Chicago, emphasizing the prolonged effort to get police commander Jon Burge suspended. The many testimonies given here are cogent and to the point, though one may regret the occasional use of actors. On the whole, a terrifying and useful document about some of the ways everyday racism functions locally. Hate (1994, 96 min.), a black-and-white French film about racism in the Paris suburbs, focuses on three alienated youths–one black (Hubert Kounde), one North African (Said Taghmaoui), and one a working-class Jew (Vincent Cassel)–who go on an all-night spree after a race riot sparked by police brutality. Though some of this might seem a bit old to Americans, writer-director Mathieu Kassovitz (Cafe au lait) has some things of his own to say–and he says them with nuance, feeling, and authority. In French with subtitles. (JR) Also on the program: Dan Roy’s Barricade Number Nine (2001, 38 min.), which includes a June 2000 clash between antipoverty activists and Ontario police, and Carlos Efrain Perez’s English-subtitled documentary Reclaiming Justice: Guerrero’s Indigenous Community Police (25 min.), about communities in Guerrero, Mexico, that responded to epidemic crime and police corruption by forming their own community policing system. (6:30)
SUNDAY, MAY 4
Becoming More
Jasmin Dizdar, whose comedy drama Beautiful People (1999, 109 min.) refers at one point to the much-touted first half hour of Saving Private Ryan, could teach Steven Spielberg a thing or two about the use of dramatic irony. The large ensemble of characters in the story, which is set in London and Bosnia, includes a physician demoralized by arguments with his estranged wife, a Bosnian refugee he treats, a disaffected youth who transcends type in a battle against deliberately cartoonish parents, and a journalist who undergoes a crisis of faith that’s perversely convenient for his wife and his network. The characters’ paths sometimes intersect–without the archness of many such elaborate plots–as Dizdar inventively examines bigotry, combining daring humor and hyperbole, dark realism and shining idealism. (LA) Also on the program: Ted White’s Return of the Scorcher (1992, 30 min.), about bicycle culture in China, Denmark, the Netherlands, and the U.S.; and a 20-minute excerpt from Doug Hawes-Davis and John Lilburn’s This Is Nowhere (2002), a documentary about RV nomads. (6:30)