The 22nd annual Women in the Director’s Chair International Film & Video Festival, featuring narrative, documentary, animated, and experimental works by women, runs Friday, March 14, through Sunday, March 23. Screenings are at the Women in the Director’s Chair Theater, 941 W. Lawrence; LaSalle Theatre, LaSalle Bank, 4901 W. Irving Park; Charles A. Hayes Family Investment Center, 4859 S. Wabash; and School of the Art Institute of Chicago Auditorium, Columbus Drive at Jackson. 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 an * are highly recommended. The schedule for March 14 through 20 follows; a full festival schedule through March 23 is available on-line at www.chicagoreader.com.
- Sisters in Cinema
The Body Eclectic
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A program of recent shorts. Exercise With Chin Yung is local filmmaker Wenhwa Ts’ao’s affectionate yet exasperated look at her tradition-minded father–an inventively edited mix of travel footage and captions that comes off as a plea for independence. Christine Khalafian’s Mark Set Burn juxtaposes microscopic shots of skin with images of a woman waxing her leg; the spooky music hints that this is some sort of commentary on the price of beauty. Carrie Schultz’s Chroma explores the phenomenon of synesthesia, which affects women more than men, but the talking heads and psychedelic images don’t add up to much. In Through the Skin: A Film About Love, Lithium and Gym Teachers, Elyse Montague describes her own puberty, “when she didn’t really want to grow into a female body,” but her experimental use of home-movie shots, distorted images, and jarring sound gets precious after a while. Also on the program: works by Kate Matthews, Naomi Uman, Lisa Yu, and Micaela O’Herlihy. 96 min. (TS) (WIDC Theater, 3:00)
Director Sou Abadi focuses on the plight of women in this 2000 video documentary about social problems in Iran, interweaving footage of a psychotherapy group, a compulsory premarital-counseling course, an Islamic charity, and government bureaucrats trying to help the poor and the homeless. While acknowledging that marriage can be a prison for Iranian women, Abadi also includes signs of hope: a husband in group therapy recognizes that he has been imposing himself on his wife; a grade school student defiantly throws off her head scarf. In French and Farsi with subtitles. 84 min. (FC) (Hayes Center, 5:00)
SUNDAY, MARCH 16
A Day’s Work
