Chicago Underground Film Festival

Any cultural institution, even a counter-cultural one, needs a few good reasons to persist if it’s going to thrive. With a canny mix of the tasteless and the tasteful, the Chicago Underground Film Festival (CUFF) has matured into one of the most valuable, least predictable of Chicago’s plethora of film festivals. And, auspiciously for filmmakers, a new grants program puts CUFF’s money where their loud mouth is as well. As run by Festival directors Jay Bliznick and Bryan Wendorf and Festival programmer Wendy Solomon, CUFF showcases emerging filmmakers while also selecting work from veterans such as Jon Jost. The Festival also salutes maverick pioneers like Paul Morrissey, or this year, the 70-year-old Alejandro Jodorowsky, who attended rare showings of his hardly-seen, image-mad classics of deranged ur-surrealism, El Topo, Santa Sangre and Holy Mountain. ("I don’t know who made those movies and I don’t know why you’re interested," he told one interviewer. "That was 30 years ago. I wouldn’t know that man if he walked up to me.")

The word "mission" when discussed in the context of underground film is often laughable, but I asked Wendorf point blank why a festival like CUFF is necessary? "Well, necessary is a pretty strong word," she laughs. "I doubt that any film festival is really ‘necessary.’ But I do think CUFF and festivals like it provide a service that more traditional indie festivals don’t. Most so-called independent film festivals still look at being an independent filmmaker as a stepping stone to Hollywood, a stage you go through, like pimples. What has been dubbed ‘Indiewood’ in recent years are the filmmakers who are trying to prove they can play the game. We want to support true independents who aren’t necessarily looking to score a deal with Miramax." That sounds fine, but the true reason, once the Festival gets under way, seems to be an excuse to throw cool parties with people the programmers like. "Isn’t that enough?" Wendorf laughs. "We’re bringing films to Chicago that for the most part wouldn’t be seen here even with the existing art house theaters, non-profit film centers and other festivals."

CUFF began its completion grants program this year, patterning the plan after a program run by Frameline, the organization that puts on the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. CUFF has funded features, shorts, documentaries and experimental work, including the strong opening night drama, Straightman, by local co-producers Ben Berkowitz and Ben Redgrave. This rough-hewn, from-the-heart story about male friendship follows two Chicago roommates in their mid-20s as their confront their different sexualties. Shot on 16mm, it was one of the few non-video features on display.

Julia Queary and Vicki Funari’s Live Nude Girls Unite! was another grant recipient. It detailed Queary’s efforts to organize the only union of strippers in the U.S. at San Francisco’s Lusty Lady club while she debates how to come out as a sex worker to her activist mother. Other recipients included underground veteran Nick Zedd, who said it was the only grant he’s ever gotten, and the eventual winner of CUFF’s audience award, Shawn Durr’s comic-horror gay-serial-killer digital-video Fucked in the Face. Durr’s film was, in fact, even more provocative than it sounds. His formally haphazard shot-on-DV style is filled with an outrage that alternates between the numbing and the outrageous.

The Gold Jury Prize for best feature went to Esther Bell’s Likable Godass, a DV coming-of-age comedy about how having a gay father can be the least of a 1988 punk girl’s problems. Todd Verow’s latest DV feature, Once and Future Queen, more assured than his recent output, took a Silver Jury Prize. The Gold Jury Prize for documentary went to Rustin Thompson’s 30 Frames A Second: The WTO in Seattle, in which the former freelance network news cameraman went behind the lines in Seattle and came back with this first-person postcard. The Silver Jury Prize for Documentary was taken by Sam Green and Christian Bruno’s Pie Fight 69, a look at a nasty pie fight preceding a past San Francisco International Film Festival.

As for shorts, a Gold Jury Prize went to Benjamin Meyer’s obsessive relationship story, Georgie Porgie, and Luis Camara Silva’s Endgame, which mingles mating and chess, got the Silver. The Gold Jury Prize for experimental shorts was awarded to Matt McCormick’s The Vyrotonin Decision, a demolishing of 36 television commercials from 1961 which astonishes for a few minutes, then grows repetitive. Deco Dawson’s film (Knout), featuring a young woman trying to tie a rope brought home the Silver. Jeff Warrington took an animated look at mutants in a colony of horse-eating, grasshopper-stewing survivalists in The Flocculus, earning a Gold Jury Prize, and Jim Trainor’s loopy tale of evolution, The Moschops, ran with the Silver. The Made In Chicago Award was earned by Jim Fotopolous’s Migrating Forms, in which a man’s stabs at soulless sex go awry when he discovers his partner is only interested in creating her own pornography.

I also admired Scott Saunders’s cybersex-jumping-to-reality This Close to Nothing. Some of the insight into relationships and tape-to-film Saunders demonstrated in The Headhunter’s Sister holds up here as the film convincingly traces the role of madness in homelessness. Cable access king Jeff Krulik presented more portraits from his human bestiary of the wild and the mild. Felicia Michaels’s Linda California, telling of a woman’s revenge after a rape, suggests a politically incorrect latter-day O. Henry version of Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45. Despite indifferent cinematography, it has wit and performance style to spare. Marjorie Chodorov’s portrait of performance artist El Vez – the exuberant Mexican Elvis – is filled with hilarious cultural commentary until the last few minutes of interview material proclaim what has already been made wonderfully, entertainingly clear in the man’s music and humor. Jem Cohen and Peter Sillen’s elusive doc, Benjamin Smoke, had its midwest premiere, but for musical mania, I was partial to Aaron Barnett’s Searching for Roger Taylor, which debuted at Slamdance. The film is a clever personal deconstruction of ’80s pop and its personalities, with Barnett trailing this long disappeared Duran Duran idol from his home in Canada to the U.K. to the U.S. Part stalker epic, part personal essay on New Wave, it made for a great "underground" anecdote – focused, intimate, and a little too revealing for every viewer’s comfort. – Ray Pride

Toronto International Film Festival by Travis Crawford
Chicago Underground Film Festival by Ray Pride