Good news for those who missed Sabine Gruffat’s inventive, unorthodox documentary I Have Always Been a Dreamer when it played at the Chicago Underground Film Festival in 2012. On Saturday the film returns to town as part of an all-night event called Dearest Chicago, Please Love Me! Yours Truly, Detroit. The Nightingale will host the event, which features three programs of experimental work shot in the Motor City over the past decade. The films were curated by Brandon Walley, a Detroit-based programmer (and an experimental filmmaker in his own right), who will also be present to introduce each program. Dreamer screens at 10 PM, preceded by one of Walley’s shorts, VACANCY. Not coincidentally, the first program of the night (which begins at 6 PM) kicks off with Chicago Detroit Split, a short work codirected by WalleyChicago-based filmmaker Thomas Comerford and Bill Brown, Gruffat’s partner and frequent collaborator.
Split will be followed by another experimental documentary called I Pity the Fool (2007). The second program of the night, which starts at 8 PM, is devoted entirely to short works, including one more by Walley (The Smell of Mommy’s Honey Muffins), and several by Oren Goldenberg, who directed a satirical web series called Detroit (Blank City). In all, these three programs should make for a swell night out at the movies—that is, for those moviegoers who aren’t tempted by the 35-millimeter revival of Howard Hawks’s The Dawn Patrol, which screens at Doc Films at 7 and 9:15 PM. Another week, another dilemma. At least the Siskel Center isn’t screening Eric Rohmer’s A Summer’s Tale on 35-millimeter until Sunday.
For further reading on Gruffat, here’s an interview I conducted with her shortly before Dreamer‘s Chicago premiere.