The inaugural Chicago International Doc Film Festival, featuring documentary films and videos, runs Friday, March 21, through Sunday, March 30. Screenings are at the Biograph, 2433 N. Lincoln; Facets Cinematheque, 1517 W. Fullerton; Northwestern Univ. Block Museum of Art, 40 Arts Circle Dr., Evanston; Society for Arts, 1112 N. Milwaukee; and Univ. of Chicago Doc Films, 1212 E. 59th St. Tickets are $8, $7 for seniors and students; passes for 10 screenings are $65; for more information call 773-486-9612. Films marked with an * are highly recommended. The following schedule is for March 21 through 27; the complete schedule is available on-line at www.chicagodocfestival.org.
SATURDAY, MARCH 22
Chronicle of an American Suburb
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H. James Gilmore, a native of Park Forest, returned home for the 50th anniversary of the pioneering planned community, which was built during the postwar housing shortage on 2,400 acres of former cornfield south of Chicago. His accessible and affectionate 2001 documentary relates how a trio of innovative developers at American Community Builders decided to erect rental town houses around a shopping center, which became both a cash cow for them and a town commons for residents. Over the years Park Forest developed a national profile as a model suburb: sociologist William H. Whyte Jr. focused on the community in his 1956 best-seller The Organization Man, and in 1967 a Look magazine story, “Negro in the Suburbs,” noted its relatively harmonious integration. Gilmore interviews founding residents and old friends, illustrating his narrative with early sales brochures and clips from his father’s home movies. The video conveys his mixed feelings about a place so nice that he had to flee it as soon as he finished high school. 57 min. (Bill Stamets) (Facets Cinematheque, 5:00)
Israeli filmmaker David Fisher uncovers a family secret: a sister he never knew who was given up for adoption at birth. In Hebrew with subtitles. 93 min. (Biograph, 5:00)
The Eye of the Day
Jose Padilha’s searing Brazilian film plays like a synthesis of Pixote and Dog Day Afternoon, documenting a June 2000 incident in which a thwarted bus robbery in Rio de Janeiro turned into a nationally televised hostage crisis. Swirling around this terrifying ordeal are despairing reflections on race, class, police corruption, media sensationalism, and social inequality. Padilha opens with an elaborately conceived tracking shot that underlines the country’s severe social and economic stratification, and as he shifts between a white-hot present tinged with fear to a hallucinatory past of death, poverty, and neglect, the movie generates an almost unendurable tension. In this context the assailant’s rage is persuasive and the resolution of the crisis grim and numbing; Padilha allows neither easy answers nor ironic commentary, producing on both sides of the conflict a world of inconsolable grief. In Portuguese with subtitles. 119 min. (Patrick Z. McGavin) (Biograph, 9:00)
