This article was written by Alejandro A. Riera
Chicago’s robust fall film festival season begins this weekend with Reeling 2023: The 41st Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival. Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of producing organization Chicago Filmmakers, this year’s festival will feature 42 feature films and 12 shorts from 25 different countries screening at the Landmark Century Centre Cinema, 2828 N. Clark St., and at Chicago Filmmakers Firehouse Cinema, 1326 W. Hollywood Ave., through October 8. About half of the films will be available to stream online beginning September 29.
Reeling kicks off September 21 with the Opening Night screening of The Mattachine Family, Andy Vallentine’s feature film debut about a gay couple who realize they have differing ideas on what makes a family after their foster child meets with his birth mother. Vallentine and lead (and Wilmette native) Nico Tortorella are set to attend the screening held at the Music Box Theatre. This year’s Centerpiece film is Tom Gustafson’s Glitter & Doom, a vibrant, colorful musical orchestrated to the music of Indigo Girls about a musician who falls in love with a circus performer and featuring appearances by Missi Pyle, Ming-Na Wen, Tig Notaro and the Indigo Girls. Glitter & Doom screens on Thursday, September 28 at 9 p.m. at the Landmark Century Center.
Close to twenty filmmakers are scheduled to attend the festival and participate in post-screening Q&As including Emily Railsback (director, American Parent), Marwan Mokbel (director and writer, The Judgment), Loveleen Kauer (director and producer, Leilani’s Fortune), Katrina Castro (assistant editor and camera, Leilani’s Fortune) and Rick Copp (producer and subject, A Big, Gay, Hairy Hit! Where the Bears Are: the Documentary), among others.
Tickets are available online at reelingfilmfest.org in advance, or at the theater’s box office on the day of the screening. Tickets for in-person screenings are $12 for regular screenings at Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema and Chicago Filmmakers Firehouse Cinema. Single Streaming Tickets are available at $10 and a Streaming Pass is available for $100. Various in-theater and hybrid in-theater/streaming passes are also available for purchase.
Following are capsule reviews of a small number of films I was able to watch in the past few days.
AMERICAN PARENT
“The film you just have seen ran on improvisation,” reads the final credit of Chicago filmmaker Emily Railsback’s narrative feature debut, and frankly, American Parent feels so lived-in, so real, that it didn’t feel like I was watching a group of actors improvise around their assigned roles. Railsback strings together a series of relatable events to tell the story of lesbian couple Bette (Rebecca Ridenour) and Elsie (Kristen Bush) as they grapple with parenthood, their careers and the COVID pandemic: a car breakdown may end up costing them between $800-$1000 on the conservative side; Elsie has to contest a letter from the Illinois Department of Employment Services that claims they were overpaid for the SNAP benefits they received during the pandemic; Bette finds out through a friend that her position as a teacher has been eliminated; and their landlord has sold the building they live in and has given them less than a week to decide if they want to stay or move. In all this day-to-day chaos, Elsie, an adjunct professor, finds out that she is a finalist for a tenure track position at a liberal arts college in Oklahoma, throwing an additional wrench into an already stressful situation. They find comfort among their friends, but most importantly, in their newborn daughter Chloe.
Railsback makes full use of her background as a documentary filmmaker to treat each incidents as matter-of-fact as possible, creating a cumulative effect as this loving couple wrestle with so many emotions and decisions. The dialogue has a very nice slice-of-life flow to it; these are the kind of conversations you and I have with our partners and friends. The drama may be low-key but so is much of life. And Rodenour’s and Bush’s performances, as well as the rest of the cast, is so unembellished, so earnest, that you can’t help but wonder how much of their own lives are they tapping into to make these characters flesh and blood. (Friday, Sep 22nd, 7:00 PM @ Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema, Theater 4)
ANHELL69
Director and narrator Theo Montoya calls his documentary debut one “without borders, without genre, a trans film.” I would add “memento mori” to his description, for Anhell 69 is a film full of sorrow, where the loss of friends and members of a community to suicide and overdose is made palpable by Montoya’s own recordings of those very same friends in happier times. Death is the film’s true protagonist as, from the first frame to last, we are confronted with its indelible presence.
We are introduced to Montoya as he lies inside a coffin driven around town in a hearse by none other than Colombian filmmaker Victor Gaviria, who, in films like The Rose Seller (1998) and Rodrigo D; No Future (1990) presented a bleak, uncompromisingly brutal view of his native city, Medellín, a city Montoya himself describes as a “ghost town” he is unable to escape but also “the mecca of homosexuality.”
Raised by women and excommunicated for confessing to masturbating while thinking of Jesus Christ, Montoya invites his friends in 2017 to a casting for a dystopian film that would be titled ANHELL69, the Instagram username of friend Camilo Najar, who would be chosen as the lead for the film before he died of an overdose (he never found out he would play the lead). In his dystopian film, ghosts co-exist with the living, leading eventually to a sexual attraction between the ethereal and the corporeal to the point that the government not only prohibits those affairs but hires killers to track down those who violate the ban. Montoya shows what the film could have looked like by enacting scenes featuring these ghosts who, with their red laser beam eyes and dark silhouettes, look like distant relatives to the forest spirits of Apitchapong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.
Montoya’s social network may have started turning into a cemetery as his friends died by suicide or overdose but he keeps their voices and their spirits alive through his audition tapes, recordings of the many underground parties they participated in, and a visit to a cemetery. It is a stunning and somber documentary. (Fri, Sep 22nd, 7:00 PM @ Chicago Filmmakers; Available online September 29, 12:00 AM - October 8, 11:59 PM, 2023)
CHASING CHASING AMY
Sav Rodgers’ feature debut may be more conventional and less lugubrious than Montoya’s but it is equally personal as it tackles the problematic legacy of Kevin Smith’s third feature. Rodgers felt seen when he first saw Chasing Amy in 2008 to the point that he would watch it once a day for 30 days. It was a difficult time for him; born as a woman, Rodgers struggled with his identity and was bullied by those he saw as his friends.
Chasing Chasing Amy may have started as his way to pay Smith back for a film he sees as a lifesaver; it ends up being much more than that. Rodgers shows how one film can mean different things to different people, that its legacy is far more complicated and cannot be summarized in a single tweet or Tik Tok video. Chasing Chasing Amy is also a love story about Rodgers’ and his partner (and later wife) Riley, a lesbian who embraces Sav’s transition. It is a relationship that, as she acknowledges in her conversations with Sav, may be seen as contradictory by outsiders.
Interviewees include Go Fish scriptwriter Guinevere Turner (who remembers how Kevin Smith went to her for advice and how her own film was overshadowed in the festival circuit and the critical intelligentsia by Smith’s feature debut Clerks); writer for The Mary Sue, Princess Weekes; writer Trish Bendix; Kevin Smith; and, the highpoint of the film, Joey Lauren Adams, who talks honestly about how the film had a negative impact in her life and career. Let us say that the picture she paints of Smith and his friendship with and tolerance of Harvey Weinstein and his crimes may make you reevaluate your appreciation of Smith’s oeuvre (I am not exaggerating when I write that this sequence made me feel the same way I felt the moment Agnes Varda went to visit “friend” Jean-Luc Godard in Faces Places).
Chasing Chasing Amy does at times veer into a bit of fannish gushing and that’s quite understandable given Rodgers’ personal feelings towards the film. But by bringing additional voices to the table, he underlines our complicated relationship to the movies. (Sat, Sep 23rd, 5:00 PM @ Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema)
20,000 SPECIES OF BEES
Another brilliant feature debut, this time from Basque filmmaker Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren. Frustrated sculptor Ane (Patricia López Arnais) leaves her husband behind in the French Basque city of Bayonne and travels with her three children to her mother’s beautiful country house on the Spanish side of the Basque country to work on her new piece while waiting for news on an academic position she applied for in Bayonne. Upon arriving, she learns that the statue of St. John sculpted by her father is gone missing again and her mother has organized a search for it. But that will be the least of her problems. Her eight-year old son, Aitor (Sofía López, winner of Best Leading Performance at this year’s Berlinale) who prefers to go by Cocó, has been behaving rather oddly. Even though she has indulged Aitor for a long time, she is puzzled and even frustrated by his behavior.
There’s good reason: Aitor doesn’t feel comfortable in his own skin, and that’s because he is beginning to identify as female but has, at his young age, no way to express it. He is too self-conscious and ashamed of his body. He asks the kind of questions that may sound precocious but for someone who’s beginning to figure things out, are the right questions to ask: “Why am I this way?” “Do you think when I was in mommy’s belly something went wrong?” “How come you know who you are and I don’t?” Aitor/Cocó finds comfort in Grand Aunt Lourdes (Ane Gabarain) who understands far more than the other adults what Aitor is going through, and on the beehives Lourdes keeps. Aitor slowly begins to shed, metaphorically, his skin, as he begins to embrace a female identity. This leads to a simple yet powerful ending, one that paves the road to acceptance for this family.
Winner also of the Best Spanish Film Award at the Málaga Film Festival and the Best Performance for its Cast at the Guadalajara Film Festival, 20,000 Species of Bees is unlike any coming-of-age story and not only because of its subject matter. It’s a levelheaded film, an observant one, in tune with the rhythms of life and the magic of nature, aware of the conflicting emotions behind such life-changing realizations. Just like American Parent, it avoids any histrionics; even the family recriminations are handled with care and the right amount of anger and frustration. This is a world where men, with the exception of big brother Eneiko, are largely absent, even though they leave a dark, patriarchal shadow in the case of Ane’s father. The restraint with which this mostly female cast imbue their performances gives this story about transitioning undeniable power. (Sun, Sep 24th, 3:30 PM @ Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema; available online September 29, 12:00 AM - October 8, 11:59 PM, 2023)