This festival of films and videos by black artists from around the world runs Friday, August 1, through Thursday, August 14, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State. Tickets are $8, $4 for Film Center members, and $3 for SAIC students. For further information, call 312-846-2800. Films marked with an * are highly recommended; unless otherwise noted, all films will be projected in 35-millimeter. Following is the schedule through August 7; a complete schedule is available online at www.chicagoreader.com.
SATURDAY, AUGUST 2
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American moviegoers may recognize the Ju/’hoansi as the hunter-gatherers who starred in Jamie Uys’s The Gods Must Be Crazy (1981). But according to this five-part documentary by John Marshall and Claire Ritchie, Uys’s portrayal of the Ju/’hoansi as happy primitives living in harmony with nature in the Kalahari Desert is typical of the patriarchal mentality that keeps them hungry and ill. “A Far Country” (89 min.) chronicles the relationship between the tribe and Marshall’s father, who in the early 50s helped build the roads that connected their desert community, Nyae Nyae, with the outside world. “End of the Road” (54 min.) and “Real Water” (54 min.) follow the Ju/’hoansi’s attempts throughout the 60s and 70s to farm the land they once foraged; they’re constantly thwarted by the South African government, which plans to turn Nyae Nyae into a game preserve where tourists can see “real” Bushmen. These first three episodes are rather dry, functioning at the level of a National Geographic special, but the two that follow are more politically charged: “Standing Tall” (54 min.) takes place at the end of apartheid and the beginning of Namibian independence, as Marshall and a coterie of Ju/’hoansi try to recruit tribesmen who’ve become wage slaves at white-owned ranches; “Death by Myth” (84 min.) focuses on Marshall’s rueful discovery that the foundation his family created to help the Ju/’hoansi become self-sufficient has adopted the same arrogant view that the natives are better off wearing loincloths and eating berries. At a little under six hours total, this may be a long haul for the less anthropologically inclined, but it offers a persistent and compelling critique of our romantic notions of the third world. (JJ) Showing over three days; this first installment includes “A Far Country” and “End of the Road.” To be projected from Beta SP video. (3:00)
Tableau Feraille
Madame Brouette
Matthew Buzzell’s 2002 documentary profiles the eloquent and eccentric jazz vocalist Jimmy Scott, whose permanent falsetto, the result of an adolescent disorder, enhanced his singular style of phrasing. Although Scott was a friend and musical colleague of Charlie Parker and Lionel Hampton in the 50s and 60s, he had a penchant for trusting the wrong agents, and after a series of unreleased or marginalized albums he disappeared from the scene until the 1990s, when a meteoric comeback led to engagements around the world. After seeing this film last year at the Savannah film festival, I immediately ordered one of Scott’s albums. 78 min. (JR) Buzzell will attend the screening. (5:30)
See listing for Saturday, August 2. (8:00)
