The inaugural Chicago International Doc Film Festival, featuring documentary films and videos, continues Friday through Sunday, March 28 through 30. Screenings are at the Biograph, Facets Cinematheque, Northwestern Univ. Block Museum of Art, and the Society for Arts, 1112 N. Milwaukee. Tickets are $8, $7 for seniors and students; passes for ten screenings are $65; for more information call 773-486-9612. Films marked with an * are highly recommended.
Cinema Verite: Defining the Moment
In Bike Like U Mean It (2002, 46 min.), Rusty Martin looks at bicycle activists in Austin, Texas. Michael Reiter, Ryan Johnson, Justin Allen, and Dan Stieglitz codirected Enduro (29 min.), about amateur auto racing on Long Island. (Facets Cinematheque, 9:00)
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The festival’s retrospective of work by Dutch documentarian Jos de Putter opens with this 2002 feature about Daymokhk, a children’s dance troupe from war-torn Chechnya, as it tours Europe by bus. Intercut with this filmed footage is video shot back in Grozny, where the kids practice their steps in front of bombed-out buildings. De Putter has a great eye for the beauty of children’s faces, and the dancers, many of whom have lost friends, fathers, and brothers to the Russian invasions of 1994 and ’99, speak calmly and with great poise about their grief-laden lives. The dance sequences crackle with energy, but there’s no overlooking the irony of the boys’ cossack costumes and traditional dances involving swords, shields, and hurled knives. In Chechen and Russian with subtitles. 75 min. (JJ) (Biograph, 9:00)
SATURDAY, MARCH 29
Short works, program four
Willem Wits directed this Dutch documentary (2002, 40 min.), about people who maintain a sense of closeness with lost loved ones by preserving their clothing. In Dutch with subtitles. Also on the program: Jacqueline Goss’s There There Square (2002, 14 min.) and The Guzzler of Grizzly Manor (2002, 12 min.). Jonathan Rosenbaum writes of the latter, “Goofy self-styled filmmaker George Kuchar tours festivals with some of his work from the 1960s and pays mocking tribute to himself and the events, with frequent allusions to the picturesque surroundings. Fun but slight.” (Society for Arts, 5:00)
