Jim Finn, a mainstay of the Chicago underground film scene until he relocated to upstate New York, is back in town for a screening of his latest work The Juche Idea at the University of Chicago tonight. The Juche Idea is a loose riff on the true story of South Korean filmmaker Shin Sang-ok, who was kidnapped by North Korean agents in 1978 and forced to produce propaganda films for Kim Jong-Il.
The Juche Idea continues Finn’s playful preoccupation with international Communism that he expressed in his 2005 Chicago-shot kosmonaut musical Interkosmos, his staging of a Maoist Shining Path guerrilla training camp inside a Peruvian women’s prison in La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo (2007), and El Morro, his tribute to Fidel Castro accompanied by Leonard Nimoy ‘s rendition of “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins.”
Also screening in tonight’s program are Finn’s shorts Great Man and Cinema (made in the style of North Korean agitprop), Decision 80, Wustenspringmaus, and El Guero. It’s tonight at 7 PM at the University of Chicago’s Film Studies Center, 5811 S. Ellis, Cobb Hall 307.