Chicago Underground Film Festival’s Sonic Sampler
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The most ambitious music film on the program, and one of the more successful, is Radiation, the second feature by the husband-and-wife team of Suki Stetson Hawley and Michael Galinsky. A keen set of observations on indie-rock culture worked into a relatively accessible fictional narrative, it’s the story of a cynical, broke fellow named Unai, who’s been booking and managing Spanish tours for American indie bands for more than a decade. As the film begins, Unai realizes that he’s lost his passion for the job, and when a tour he’s set up for the band Come falls apart he decides to take an overemoting New York performance poet on the road instead, hoping desperately to feed off her enthusiasm.
Radiation was financed by Galinsky and Hawley’s friends and family, and believe it or not the exotic setting was dictated by their limited budget: the couple were going to be in Spain anyway, to show their first feature film, Half-Cocked (1994), on a traveling bill with Come and some other underground flicks. “We were going to have all these locations and all of these people around who could help us, so we took advantage of the situation,” Galinsky says. They incorporated the band into the script, and Unai was played by Unai Fresnedo, who does in real life what he does in the film, only successfully: in fact, he arranged the tour they were on. While in the film Come’s shows are canceled for lack of ticket sales, Galinsky says, “the truth is that a lot of these bands do great over there–better, in fact, than they do in the U.S.”
Admission to the Chicago Underground Film Festival, which runs Friday, August 13, through Thursday, August 19, at the Village Theatre at 1548 N. Clark, costs $6 per show, $25 for five shows, or $75 for all shows; see Section Two for specific screening times or call 773-866-8660 for more info.
