The fifth annual European Union Film Festival continues Friday, February 15, through Thursday, February 28, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State. Admission is $8, $4 for Film Center members. For further information call 312-846-2800. All films will be shown in 35-millimeter prints, and those marked with an * are highly recommended.
In July
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Pressured to come up with a best-seller, a writer tries to jazz up his staid life by picking a fight with an itinerant young punk and winds up in a drag race. This 2001 existential satire by Finnish director Kari Vaananen (best known as an actor for Aki Kaurismaki) takes on masculinity, consumerism, police brutality, and the corrosive power of fame–so many targets, in fact, that it soon spins out of control, much like the protagonists’ roaring autos. The ranting and raving, though frantically edited and accompanied by loud rock, ultimately add up to little more than a drunken screed against conformity. In Finnish with subtitles. 80 min. (TS) (4:00)
- Screamin’ Jay Hawkins: I Put a Spell on Me
A recurring image of swirling clouds, both durable and volatile, provides the central metaphor in this 2001 epistolary documentary, an extraordinarily touching confession of motherly love by Belgian filmmaker Marion Hansel. Charlotte Rampling supplies the voice-over, reading fragments from letters that Hansel wrote to her son from his birth through his 18th year, accompanied by minimalist music. The letters are both poetical and quotidian, expressing pride, pleasure, guilt, and sadness over a relationship frequently interrupted by her career, and the haunting images, some shot around her home and others excerpted from earlier films, counterpose harsh nature and tranquil domesticity. 76 min. (TS) (6:15)
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 17
The Sky Is Falling
