The fourth annual Chicago Anarchist Film Festival continues Friday through Sunday, May 2 through 4. Screenings will be at Buddy, 1542 N. Milwaukee, second floor. Suggested donation is $5, and all films will be shown by video projection; for more information call 773-862-1011.
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Four documentaries: Coleman Romalis’s Emma Goldman: The Anarchist Guest (2000, 42 min.), a Canadian profile of the legendary activist; Hope Tucker’s Queen of the Loop (2000, 30 min.), about women bike messengers in Chicago; Tomas McCabe and Andrei Rozen’s Bum’s Paradise (2002, 53 min.), a look at the homeless people who colonized a peninsular landfill on San Francisco Bay; Vicky Cervantes’s Radio Campesino (12 min.), about Chicago activists creating a radio station in Honduras; and Ben Unwin’s Well Done, Now Sod Off (2000, 85 min.), about Chumbawamba, the British punk ensemble that unexpectedly became a multiplatinum-selling pop act. (6:30)
SATURDAY, MAY 3
Jasmin Dizdar, whose comedy drama Beautiful People (1999, 109 min.) refers at one point to the much-touted first half hour of Saving Private Ryan, could teach Steven Spielberg a thing or two about the use of dramatic irony. The large ensemble of characters in the story, which is set in London and Bosnia, includes a physician demoralized by arguments with his estranged wife, a Bosnian refugee he treats, a disaffected youth who transcends type in a battle against deliberately cartoonish parents, and a journalist who undergoes a crisis of faith that’s perversely convenient for his wife and his network. The characters’ paths sometimes intersect–without the archness of many such elaborate plots–as Dizdar inventively examines bigotry, combining daring humor and hyperbole, dark realism and shining idealism. (LA) Also on the program: Ted White’s Return of the Scorcher (1992, 30 min.), about bicycle culture in China, Denmark, the Netherlands, and the U.S.; and a 20-minute excerpt from Doug Hawes-Davis and John Lilburn’s This Is Nowhere (2002), a documentary about RV nomads. (6:30)
