The 20th annual Women in the Director’s Chair International Film and Video Festival, featuring narrative, documentary, animated, and experimental works by women, continues Friday through Sunday, March 23 through 25. Screenings are at the Women in the Director’s Chair Theater, 941 W. Lawrence. Unless otherwise noted, tickets are $8, $6 for students, seniors with a valid ID, and members of Women in the Director’s Chair. Festival passes are also available; for more information call 773-907-0610. Films marked with a 4 are highly recommended.
Grrlyshow
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
More than 20 years after feminists broke with their proscriptive philosophy to advocate whatever women wanted, they’re still pushing the envelope. In Our Bodies, Our Minds, Rebecca M. Alvin interviews seven cheery, intelligent sex workers who defend their occupation: erotic dancers are “empowered . . . controlling a roomful of everymen”; a porn filmmaker describes her work as “a very feminist thing,” explaining that before women got behind the camera “our fantasies and sexuality were completely ignored”; a porn actress says there’s a talent in “being able to take amazing things up your anus.” Their families don’t always accept their career choice, and police sometimes dismiss them when they’ve been raped, but the overall picture here is so upbeat that you’d never guess any hookers could be drug addicted, pimp slapped, or mentally ill. On the same program: Kara Herold’s Grrlyshow and Tricia Creason Valencia’s Eighty Layers of Me (That You’ll Have to Survive), on a group of former cheerleaders who stage activist rallies. 97 min. (FC) Alvin and Valencia will attend the screening, which will be followed by a dance party. Admission is $10, $8 for students, seniors, and WIDC members. (9:00)
Translating Zapotec
Martha Goell Lubell and Barbara Attie’s 57-minute video Daring to Resist weaves together the stories of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust as teenagers. The intercutting of interviews, archival footage, stills, and present-day shots of key locales is a bit muddled, but the stories’ details are moving enough: one girl trusted her boyfriend’s assessment of the Nazi roundups rather than her father’s and survived while the father perished; another, summoned to photograph a local Nazi leader, was convinced that he would kill her if she captured his cruel visage and asked him to smile. Susana Donovan’s enigmatic Haunt #451 conflates events from human and geological history: voice-overs about mass extinctions and images of violent events on stars are tinged by hints of personal trauma as the filmmaker tries to find her place in the scheme of things. On the same program, Alejandra Szeplaki’s She and Jennifer Petrucelli and Rachel Antell’s Her Own Law. 98 min. (FC) (6:00)
SUNDAY, MARCH 25
