The next Rendezvous in Chicago screening, to be held at the great Buffalo International Film Festival in New York next month, will also be our 28th and final theatrical screening before the movie is made available to stream via our distributor Cow Lamp Films. The screening will take place at Halwalls Contemporary Arts Center on Sunday, October 13 at 5:00pm and be followed by a Q&A with me and producer Layne Marie Williams. There will also be a review of the film on a major indie film website to coincide with this screening. You can find out more, including ticket and venue info, on the BIFF site here.

The final Chicago theatrical screening of RENDEZVOUS IN CHICAGO will occur at 6740Micro, a delightful microcinema operated by the folks behind the New 400 Theater in Rogers Park, the evening of Wednesday, September 25. Doors open at 7:00pm and the show starts promptly at 7:30pm. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with me and actress Clare Cooney moderated by film critic Andrea Thompson (Chicago Reader, RogerEbert.com). Admission is $5, the show is CASH ONLY and it is expected to sell out – so please arrive early! There will also be a cash bar. The exact address is 6740 N. Sheridan Rd (2nd floor). For more information, please visit the Facebook event page of the screening.

It was an honor to review Abbas Kiarostami’s great 1989 doc HOMEWORK for Cine-File Chicago. It screens as part of the Gene Siskel Film Center’s invaluable Kiarostami retrospective twice in the next week:

Abbas Kiarostami’s HOMEWORK
Friday and Monday, 6pm
“It’s not really a film, more a piece of research.” So says an off-screen Abbas Kiarostami, with characteristic modesty, to an unseen passerby while filming the scene of children walking to school that opens this delightful and deceptively simple documentary. While Kiarostami is widely regarded as one of the giants of narrative cinema in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, his prolific side-career as a documentarian is less well-known due to the vagaries of international film distribution. This 1989 feature, which grew out of and serves as a companion piece to the director’s 1987 breakthrough masterpiece WHERE IS THE FRIEND’S HOUSE?, is an ideal place for the uninitiated to start exploring his non-fiction work. The majority of the running time is devoted to direct-to-camera interviews with students from Tehran’s Shahid Masumi elementary school about the topic of homework; but the conversations between Kiarostami and his subjects gradually deepen so that the film eventually becomes an ethical inquiry into corporal punishment, poverty, illiteracy and the clash between tradition and modernity in post-revolutionary Iran. Kiarostami’s masterstroke here was to foreground the filmmaking process by occasionally cutting from close-ups of the children to “reverse angles” of the cinematographer who was filming them with a 16mm camera—and thus frequently reminding the viewer of exactly what these kids were seeing during the interviews. In a subtle but radical way, these “intrusive” shots invite us to empathize with the children, one of whom is terrified by the adult filmmaking team to the point of crying hysterically. That the film climaxes with an unexpectedly passionate recitation by this timid and reluctant interview subject is a testament to how Kiarostami was able to coax great performances out of children and non-actors alike. (1989, 78 min, DCP Digital) MGS

RENDEZVOUS IN CHICAGO will screen three times in three different Chicago suburbs at the 9th Lake County Film Festival this weekend:

Waukegan, Saturday, September 7 at 7:15pm
Lake Forest, Sunday, September 8 at 7:00pm
Grayslake, Monday, September 9 7:00pm

I will be present for a live Q&A after all three screenings. More info, including exact venue and ticket info, can be found on the LCFF website here.

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I was also honored this week to be the subject of an essay by San Francisco-based filmmaker and historian Daniel Kremer (OVERWHELM THE SKY). Check out his thoughts on MERCURY IN RETROGRADE, RENDEZVOUS IN CHICAGO and COOL APOCALYPSE in his essay “The Spaces Around the Stories” at his excellent ConFluence Film Blog.