The Chicago International Children’s Film Festival, now in its 16th year, runs Friday through Thursday, October 15 through 21, at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton; Biograph, 2433 N. Lincoln; and Burnham Plaza, 826 S. Wabash. Tickets are $6 for children and adults, $4.50 for Facets members; various discounts are available for four or more tickets. For more information call 773-281-2166. Programs marked with a 4 are highly recommended.
Upsidedown Mountain
Lou Diamond Phillips stars in this made-for-cable drama about a popular high school janitor who’s forced to pass an equivalency test to reclaim his job. Hallmark Cards produced the film, and Robert Munic’s screenplay includes plenty of contrived heartwarming moments as the janitor’s young friends rally around him, plus a few tutorials in multiculturalism and learning disabilities. Phillips rescues the film with a solid performance, supplying the range of emotion missing from the script. Directed by Munic; with Joan Chen. (TS) Phillips will attend the screening. (Burnham Plaza, 10:15)
Brave Hearts
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The centerpiece of this video program is It Takes a Child, Judy Jackson’s 56-minute Canadian video about child-labor activist Craig Kielburger. A passionate voice, Kielburger got involved in the issue at age 12 and helped found the organization “Free the Children,” but what makes the video work is Jackson’s juxtapositions: we see Kielburger as a baby in a home video and Kielburger in India; we hear Kielburger at 15 narrating images of his crusade at 12, acknowledging that he can never fully understand the plight of third world children who work in virtual slavery. He meets with world leaders, but more impressive are his quieter moments–playing tin-can soccer with a lone street kid. Guan Leiming’s Two Boys contrasts with surprising directness the lives of 12-year-old boys from Szechwan and Beijing: the former lives in a home with no running water and walks six miles to school, while the latter has a phone and computer in his bedroom. Lower Orders, a claymation video by Australian Nick Hilligoss, fancifully extends these egalitarian sentiments to the insect world, as the garbage can behind a restaurant becomes a take-out joint for Hilligoss’s lovingly created vermin. The most gorgeous piece is Jung Hwa Kim’s Korean animation, Rain, a story of a young child finding its mother in the rain, the lushly poetic images beautifully rendering the misty atmosphere. (FC) On the same program, films from France, Taiwan, and the U.S. (Facets Multimedia Center, 11:45)
Short videos with ecological themes, from Mozambique, Japan, and the UK. (Facets Multimedia Center, 4:00)
Videos made by children, most of them from the U.S. and UK. The longest, Jared Martin’s Khmer Street, concerns a Cambodian teenager in Philadelphia whose girlfriend’s father criticizes his affiliation with a gang. The video, which endorses traditional Cambodian culture and opposes violence, uses too many technical tricks, but the handheld camera and individual images are often powerful. Preston Burger directed and narrates Tap: The Migration of a People and Their Dance, an intelligent study of tap dance and its African-American roots that also touches on the history of African-American dance and of slavery, the latter illustrated with clips from commercial films. In Looking 4 God, ten-year-old video maker and protagonist Chaille Stovall is upset by a televangelist’s threats of hell and embarks on a multireligious inquiry leading him to the ecumenical conclusion that “God is everywhere”–a profound insight for a child. Twelve-year-old Ian Tobin directed and appears in Winged Attack, in which he demonstrates his knowledge of and love for birds of prey. Some of the other animations are charming; Don’t Drink and Drive makes an especially effective use of stark black-and-white lines to convey its message. (FC) (Facets Multimedia Center, 10:00)
