The tenth annual Chicago Underground Film Festival continues Friday through Tuesday, August 29 through September 2, at Landmark’s Century Centre. Tickets are $9, festival passes $30 (for five screenings) and $100 (for all screenings). For more information call 866-468-3401. Films marked with an * are highly recommended.
For Those About to Rock
Shot on video and film over seven years, American filmmaker Vivek Bald’s absorbing examination of the Asian Underground movement in English rock in the 90s combines interview and performance footage of all the key players–Talvin Singh, Fun-Da-Mental, Cornershop, Joi, and Asian Dub Foundation. Nearly every musician interviewed talks about experiencing anti-Asian racism while growing up. Bald shows how defensive identification with England’s black population led them to embrace reggae and hip-hop in addition to Indian sounds like Bollywood sound track music, bhangra, and Indian classical music. A passing moment of attention from the mainstream media and major record labels has embittered some of the performers but left others more focused and still hopeful. 83 min. (Peter Margasak) (7:00)
Occult of Personality
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Fever Dreams
James Fotopoulos’s meditative video consists mostly of stills of three actresses–variously clothed, nude, or masked–so similar in appearance that their identities sometimes seem to merge. Allusive dialogue spoken by various voices (one of them computer generated) traces the outer boundaries of narrative coherence, but also contains echoes of Bergman’s Persona. Some of the dialogue bespeaks the characters’ discomfort within their own bodies (“Why are you cutting yourself and hitting people?”), a theme that informs much of Fotopoulos’s work. While the corresponding images reinforce the theme of the body as a trap, his use of techniques that amplify video noise seem to leave room for the possibility of transcendent transformation. 61 min. (FC) (3:15)
