Women in the Director’s Chair International Film and Video Festival
Short works on film and video by Rozalinda Borcila, Na’ama Batya Lewin, Jeanine Corbet, Anne-Lise Breuning, Barbara Johnson, and Patricia Armstrong. (United Church of Rogers Park, 7:00)
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A New York performance artist returns home to a small Georgia town to care for her mother, who’s suffering a mental breakdown. Ruth Leitman’s 1998 documentary slyly underscores the women’s exhibitionism as they pour their hearts out to the camera, revealing their troubled psychosexual history; some of their revelations may be half-truths, while some are shockingly real (the family photo album with its snapshots the child took of her parents having sex), but in the manner of a southern gothic they never fail to fascinate. (TS) On the same program, Danielle Ash’s clay animation short Aily. (United Church of Rogers Park, 9:00)
SATURDAY, MARCH 27
Reservation X: Native Nations in the 90s
Anne Marie Fleming’s Tiresias offers a short, hilarious version of Ovid with stick figures. (JR) On the same program, 14 other animated works. (Decima Musa, 11:00)
Sohrab Shahid Saless: Far From Home, Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa’s highly personal tribute and invaluable introduction to the seminal filmmaker who worked in Iran and Germany and died last summer in Chicago, mixes clips, commentary, and interviews to create a poetic, bittersweet statement about loss and exile. (JR) Camille Billops’s Take Your Bags is an intriguing look at the loss of African heritage, though ultimately it’s spoiled by the filmmaker’s didacticism. (TS) On the same program,works by Aida Ghidey, Persheng Vazari, Fatimah Tobing Rony, and Jenny Perlin; a panel discussion with Rony, Perlin, Vazari, and Saeed-Vafa follows the screening. (South Shore Cultural Center, 3:00)
