"Living in an undescribed world is hard. You have to try it to know what it feels like. It's like having no identity. Your problems and suffering disappear. They disintegrate. To put it more radically, you feel completely cut off from other people. You cannot refer to anything because nothing has been described and properly named. You are alone."

Or, in the words of Virginia Woolf, "Nothing has really happened until it's been described." No doubt this is not strictly true, but certainly having a cinematic voice in a world that has come to express and understand itself cinematically is vital to being heard, to joining our day's Great Conversation. Each year at the Chicago International Film Festival, so many voices contribute their stories, and each effort to describe and properly name helps those of us who attend not just to better understand other cultures, but also ourselves. The 2002 line-up is particularly is diverse and compelling, and we're delighted to be able to share a sampling of reviews from this year's films. We'll be adding new reviews throughout the festival; select films will be reviewed in more detail upon their theatrical release.

(For index of reviewed films, see right hand column above.)

UNITED STATES
JUST A KISS
DIRECTOR: FISHER STEVENS
Waking Life turned live-action into animation; this film uses a similar technique, but more sparingly. A person or object or even the entire scene flickers in and out of animation, but the effect is kept from coming across as gimmicky because the focus is always on the characters and their very complicated relationships. Indeed, this is a film about the painful complexities of turn-of-the-century relationships, or, rather, the vicious cycle: people seek to protect themselves from the betrayal and rejection that come with casual sex by growing cold and bitter and hard; in any culture that uses insensibility for protection, however, petty brutalities proliferate, causing people to both escape deeper into themselves and strike out more brutally. Ergo, the very closeness people long for is walled ever more effectively. It's a deal with the devil, and in this film, there's hell to pay for this circle of New York friends. Rebecca is oppressed by her domineering mother and dance troupe director ("You were a much better dancer when you were bulimic.") Her boyfriend Peter's great success is dressing up like an eagle for American Peanut Butter commercials, a gig he was turned onto by his director friend, Dag, whose relationship with Hallie crashes and burns, the consequence of bad choices that lead to worse consequences for all. This film feels like an independent with mainstream production values, though the mainstream may not go for it: sudden shifts of tone are liable to cause whiplash, and many viewers are liable to bail as the absurdity of its black humor continues to ratchet up. Those who hang in there will discover this film has a moral center after all, and the wild ride may prove cathartic for those looking to break out of vicious circle.

HONG KONG
MY LIFE AS MCDULL
DIRECTOR: TOE YUEN
An animated feature from Hong Kong, reminiscent of animé, but only in the level of detail. The animation is eclectic - from simple line drawings to Gilliamesque collage to rotoscoped live action. The tone is comfortably numb, a wistful look at how difficult it is to find a reason to dream in a world where dreams obviously don't come true - a coming-of-age film, as such, on learning to live within one's limitations. McDull is a pig who longs to be somebody and to escape his humdrum life. His mother is an annoying overachiever, who makes promises, but always reneges. There's a laugh-til-you-cry sequence as his mother tries a hilarious cooking show, recombining the same elements to make the same tasteless dishes. And an unexpected Christmas sequence, which seems a ray of light from another world: in this case, a taste of wild, otherworldy hope that seems at odds with the Buddhist stoicism that seems at times to be the main thrust of the story. You can't always get what you want. But don't let that stop you from savoring life's little pleasures: from the taste of turkey to the feeling of the ocean lapping against your calves, to sweet, if oddball, movies like this.

IRAN
AFGHAN ALPHABET
Aleph bay-e Afgan
DIRECTOR: MOHSEN MAKHMALBAF
Mohsen Makhmalbaf, master of the incisive image, opens this short documentary with one reminiscent of the signature shot from his last feature, Kandahar - amputees on crutches, racing each other for air-dropped artificial limbs. Here, the crutches are employed by a crippled child, his limbs intact but deformed. The boy makes his way around a dry mud village to sit outside a school and listen. Not every Afghan child can yet go to school, says the narrator, but knowledge is in the air. The narrator is Makhmalbaf - and the interviewer and cameraman. Following the lead of Abbas Kiarostami, another of Iran's most prominent directors seems intent on gaining ever-less mediated access to his subjects. This is Makhmalbaf's Homework: similar to Kiarostami's documentary which featured interviews with Iranian children as a way into deep and unexpected revelations about Iranian society; this film, which so knowingly uses the veil as a symbol of Afghan isolation, doesn't really penetrate as quite deeply as the Kiarostami film. Yet how wonderful it is to see little Afghan girls in school, even if some of them are still reluctant to discard their education in their own inferiority by Mullah Omar. But as Makhmalbaf suggests, change is in the air.

GREAT BRITAIN/IRELAND
BLOODY SUNDAY
DIRECTOR: PAUL GREENGRASS
"I can't believe the news today," goes the immensely-singable hit song. "I can't close my eyes and make it go away." Many of us have sung blithely along with U2 without having images in our head of, say, "bodies strewn across a dead end street" - images that haunted Bono and inspired his lament, "Sunday, Bloody Sunday." Those who see this film will be in a much better position to appreciate the depth of his passion. We are led backstage to the events of January 30th, 1972, on which Sunday a peaceful march ended with a massacre that killed whatever non-violent wing of the Republican resistance existed and set a course for more violence and tragedy. Many films have employed a documentary style for key moments; here is an attempt to maintain the effect for the entire film. It works for the action sequences, but the expository sequences sometimes seem a little forced as activists or police "just happen" to have a conversation containing all the information we viewers need to understand what's happening. (They might have done better to just follow through with their documentary inclinations and include some "talking head" interviews to dispense with the back-story.) Any quibbles with style dissipate as the film reaches the climactic moment: when jazzed-up cops started firing at unarmed marchers, completely losing their heads and picking people off like so many targets in a shooting gallery. The ease with which they start identifying unarmed and fleeing marchers as "terrorists" is positively chilling. The tally at the end of the day: 27 marchers shot, 13 dead, and no British wounded. "You've got to find some justification," one officer tells his men. "We're working on it," is the reply, resonating with any number of present-day intifadas and the accompanying spirals of violence and we find ourselves joining U2's mournful plea, "How long must we sing this song?"

BRAZIL
CITY OF GOD
Cidade de Deus
DIRECTOR: Claude de Deus
This film cut a broad swath through the festival circuit since Cannes, and always accompanied by the warning of its excessive violence. I found it much less excessive, at least in terms of onscreen gore, than I expected: indeed, one senses a certain discretion on the part of the director, given the subject matter. The subject has to do with life in a slum outside Rio de Janeiro, the City of God. Ingredients of ghetto life Americans may be at least somewhat familiar - poverty, lack of options, boredom, the identity quests and power games of youth - combine here with corrupt law enforcement and a crazy plenitude of guns. "Kill. Be respected" is the macho creed, one only few, like Rocket, choose not to follow. A non-stop and percussive beat propels us through Rocket's childhood and world, burrowing into the ghetto, following the rise and fall of local hoods, story opening upon story. The films's non-Euclidian narrative structure will remind some of Pulp Fiction and choppy cutting of Steven Soderbergh, though, as with last years Amores Perros, such techniques feel more organic to these Latino films by Latino directors set in their own gritty world than in splashy Hollywood-manufactured imitations. Advertised at the Chicago International Film Festival as still a "work-in-progress": perhaps the author and distributor, Mirimax, are still negotiating over the editing of a few admittedly disturbing scenes. In any case, an incredible accomplishment, if only, like Rocket's, a snapping a picture of this crazy world which is the whole world for those struggling to survive within it.

FRANCE
SAFE CONDUCT Laissez-passer
DIRECTOR: BERTRAND TAVERNIER
Continental Films was a German-owned movie studio in occupied Paris where French artists and workman, pressed between Nazi bosses and Allied bombs were a microcosm of the Occupation: an ideal setting within which to wrestle with the dualities of Resistance and Collaboration, pride and shame, forever unresolveable in French history, and sometimes even in the same individual. We follow two characters (based on real people) whose lives intertwine, but instead of neatly dividing them into one side or the other, both are a complex mix of motives. Jean Devaivre works as an assistant director on Continental melodramas by day, and blows up trains with the Resistance by night. He maintains his balancing act with great difficulty, insisting he works under Germans, but not for them. Jean Aurenche is a screenwriter, and in one of the most delightfully-obvious touches ever made in a movie about film, lives and works in a whorehouse. Aurenche uses his skill with words to justify his move from woman to woman, but retains enough principle to refuse jobs the German producers keep thrusting at him (there's a shortage of writers: they were all Jews). This is a marathon of a film, yet it never drags and the amazing Hitchcockian sequence where Devaivre battles a head cold during some increasingly-complicated espionage is a great argument for nearly three-hour movies. A smart period film which, as is noted during a whorehouse discussion about art, offers fine opportunities to sneak ideas past the viewers while they're enjoying the scenery.

UNITED STATES
ONLY THE STRONG SURVIVE
DIRECTORS: D.A. PENNEBAKER & CHRIS HEGEDUS
They're "getting the band back together": those who are still around, that is. The spirit of the ones who didn't make it, Belushi, and more importantly, Otis Redding, hang heavy over this film, but not so much to diminish the strength and life of their fellow Blues Brothers and Sisters who found one way or another to survive. Stax Records was Memphis's answer to Motown. In the middle of the last century, people like Redding, Rufus Thomas and his daughter Carla came together here to create what became known as "the Memphis Sound": soul music. You needed soul to sing it, you needed even more soul to live with it. Sam Moore, the original Soul Man, who used to do and sell the same drugs as Belushi, found himself a good woman who helped him kick his bad habits; his nickname is "Blessed." Others survived substance abuse, racism, ripoff record contracts in their own ways, good marriages, education, getting day jobs, or jive and flash, like Wilson Pickett. Jerry Butler, who got a job in Cook County government, wrote the autobiography that gives this documentary its title. In interviews, archival footage, recent performances and hanging out together backstage, we see how tough and tender these survivors are, a family: "We've been through so much together," sings Sam on a stage he knows he is about to surrender. This fine documentary gives them a chance to sing it one more time.

UNITED STATES
ROGER DODGER
DIRECTOR: DYLAN KIDD
Roger Swanson is a combination of Commander Data and the Devil himself: the paradox that is being a human, a rational animal. He can coldly analyze female sexual response or offer abstract schematics for stealing glances of female flesh: speaking of flesh, he also has Hannibal Lector's gift for ripping out your deepest fears and using them against you. Roger writes ad copy: his stock and trade are words, but the best use he can put them to seems to be in service to the libido to which he is enslaved. Enter Roger's fresh-faced and innocent nephew Nick, who wants some advice on getting girls. Like all who deal with the Devil, Nick gets more than he bargained for as Roger leads him ever deeper into the Inferno that such a reductionist approach to sexual relationships must be. While Roger gives some evidence that he can't live in the world he has talked himself into believing, he also seems beyond redemption. Whether Nick will learn from his uncle to successfully objectify and prey upon women and so lose his innocence is but one of several Big Questions raised by this smart but and funny, if disturbing, film.

UNITED STATES/SOUTH AFRICA
AMANDLA! A REVOLUTION
IN FOUR PART HARMONY
DIRECTOR: LEE HIRSCH
Asked by Nelson Mandela to sing at his inauguration, Ladysmith Black Mambazo is the group which has most popularized South African "worker's songs" around the world. But there are other musical traditions from this most musical nation, including Freedom Songs, which accompanied and sustained the struggle against a brutal racist regime for forty years. This documentary combines a history of Apartheid and the resistance against it with the history of the music which brought together and moved so many. From old footage showing Hendrik Verwoerd, the "Father of Apartheid," describing Apartheid as "good neighborliness" the film cuts to those "neighbors" inspired by the Freedom Songs of Vuyisile Mini, especially "Watch Out Verwoerd," which became a hit on the streets of black communities. As many of these were razed and their populations forcibly removed to "townships," the songs evolved from mostly prayers to calls to battle. Mini was hanged by the regime, and in this film we see his body exhumed from a mass grave and reburied with honor, all the while battle scarred veterans of the movement recall, and sing, the old songs. Sophie Mgcina's acapella rendition of "Madam, Please," a song of a domestic mournfully pleading to her overbearing white employer, is unforgettable. "The thing that saved us was music," says jazz pianist Abdullah Ibriham. "It was part of liberating ourselves." A powerful story made powerful by its beautiful music.

UNITED STATES
FRIDA
DIRECTOR: JULIE TAYMOR
Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, who combined European Modernism with ancient Aztec and Mayan styles and his political beliefs, became an artistic and political leader in the first half of 20th century Mexico. This film is about his wife, Frida Kahlo. The Twenties Roared mightily South of the Border, as Frida and Diego were caught up in revolutionary times, overturning traditions and often reaping personal and tragic consequences from the dissolution of the center. Frida was a painter who apprenticed herself to Diego before becoming his lover. Her style drew upon some of the same sources as his, but was entirely distinct: grotesques, naked, twisted bleeding bodies, fetuses, disembodied organs, wounded androgynous figures reflecting her suffering at the hands of unfaithful men and her chronic pain from a terrible bus accident which increased, despite more than a dozen operations and various forms of medical torture, as she aged. The irresistible challenge in making films about artists is to convey something of the visual style of the artist in the film: here, bright colors and dream sequences and visions help give life to Frida's work, but the translation from simple, iconic forms to three dimensions enforces a literalization and conventional narrative that in some ways works against the power of the original work. Still, this is an engaging biopic that tells a story which would be unbelievable if it were fiction, going so quickly as it does from Rivera's notorious Rockefeller Center mural fiasco (he insisted on placing Lenin in the crowd scenes; the Rockefellars disapproved) to going back to Mexico to hide Bolshevik expatriate Leon Trotsky - with whom Frida has a torrid affair. Paradoxically, it is the faithfulness of Frida and Diego which holds things together in this grotesque vision of personal pain. Directed with great sympathy by another woman artist of audacity, Julie Taymor.

IRELAND/UNITED KINGDOM
EVELYN
DIRECTOR: BRUCE BERESFORD
Pet project of Pierce Brosnan, who also produced, this film based on a true story is essentially a Movie of the Week "issue film." The subject is the 1953 Irish court case which declared unconstitutional a tidy deal between Church and State that left parents with virtually no rights. The film is a classic courtroom drama: meet the defendant, hear about his problem, watch a colorful legal team assemble and build their case, then, after a few setbacks, stage a climactic courtroom showdown where an inspirational speech decides the case in favor of the hero. In fact, Bruce Beresford directs as if the Law of Courtroom Dramas was being enforced by Sister Bridgette herself, armed with her ruler; he would have done well to show some spunk and overturn it with the least bit of original flair. Beresford (Black Robe) seems to have some issues with the Catholic Church: if his experience with the Church was as bad as he depicts it, you can't blame him. What he might possibly be blamed for is channeling a stream of ideological bile into the mix, and in this case, a bit of smarmy sentimentality as well (do yourself a favor and get out before the syrupy closing credits song, "Angel Rays" begins.)

UNITED STATES
WELCOME TO COLLINWOOD
DIRECTORS: ANTHONY & JOSEPH RUSSO
It's another caper film from George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh (two big names associated with last year's Ocean's Eleven): this time they're sharing Executive Producer credits, and you have to at least admire their willingness to publicly take the blame. "As a film, it's a disaster," observes a character in this lame one-gimmick movie, and he's right. The one gimmick is this: cute jargon. A "Bellini" is a big-time caper, a "Mullinski" is paying somebody to do your jail time. Both are in play, and those producers better be careful people don't start referring to films like this as a "Clooney" or a "Soderbergh," though the latter is much less likely than the former. The Russo Brothers frequent resort to long takes in wide angle give the actors playing this bumbling gang trying to pull off a jewelry-store heist no place to hide from their humiliating script. By the time we are treated to the sight of Clooney dressed as an Orthodox Rabbi in a wheel chair, we are not laughing with this film but at it. The real low-point, though, is the homeless guy who drops his drawers and moons the audience. What a waste of the always entertaining William H. Macy in such fine side-burns.

UNITED STATES
BROWN SUGAR
DIRECTOR: RICK FAMUYIWA
Not necessarily my genre, but I understand what it's like to fall in love with a style or artform, watch it grow from unformed and adventurous to sold-out and successful, and wish you could go back to where it all started and reclaim the magic. That's the broad sweep of this film, the history of Hip Hop set against the history of a relationship. Dre is a record company exec, selling to the masses; Sidney is a music journalist who laments the loss of authenticity of the music. A couple of friends who take way too long to decide they need to be together, these two have to close-down their existing relationships in order to free themselves for love: but making Dre's wife the symbol of Sell-Out that he has to abandon seems morally disingenuous in a film supposedly about fidelity and integrity. The best part of this movie is the comic relief: Rin and Tin, the Hip Hop Dalmatians: a white guy and a black guy who know just how to package their act (including remaking Michael Jackson's "The Girl Is Mine" as "The Ho is Mine.") Hollywood sermons about authenticity are rarely convincing, but the masses will love this.

UNITED STATES
BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE
DIRECTOR: MICHAEL MOORE
A little Michael Moore, some would say, goes a long way. A larger-than-life, let's just say it - obnoxious and sometimes self-righteous character, Moore is the bull in the china shop of documentary social criticism. But Moore makes a convincing case that he was the exact right person to tell this story, from his own distinctive point of view. For one thing, his home state of Michigan is clearly a crossroads for the gun culture he's trying to understand: home to the Michigan Militia, just ordinary folk who arm to the teeth and practice camo-clad weekend night patrols, home to Oklahoma bombing conspirator Terry Nichols' brother, James, who was arrested but released and happy to share his radical opinions here with Moore. Michigan is also home to Oscoda Air Force base, where Columbine killer Eric Harris lived before he moved to Littleton, Colorado. Moore interviews kids that knew Harris, or, more significantly, could have been him, on his quest to figure out what it is about American culture that makes us have such an outrageously high number of murders committed annually with guns. Searching for the answer to this disturbing question, Moore talks to a range of folk from shock-rocker (and sometime scapegoat for Columbine) Marilyn Manson to NRA president, Charlton Heston. The interview with Heston is priceless, an old man who can't get his Moses mojo going, unable to answer why he feels such a compelling need to hold pro-gun rallies in towns where children have just murdered other children with guns. No doubt, all Moore's usual excesses are in evidence here: those, like Heston, who don't want to hear his questions will find reason to turn him off. The rest of us leave this film devastated, wanting to sit alone for awhile and ponder the world we have made and are grateful that the seemingly invincible Goliath that is the NRA has taken a hit from this pudgy, obnoxious David.

FRANCE / BELGIUM
THE TRILOGY
La Trilogie DIRECTOR: LUCAS BELVAUZ
Tolkien fans might be understandably miffed to learn there are other three-part works in the world, and there are many, but here's a director with the audacity to refer to his by the definite article, and give us no other name but "La Trilogy". Of course, any director who shoots three films at once - and finishes them all at once, Peter Jackson take note - must have plenty of audacity to begin with. These three films focus on the lives of a half-dozen or so people, changing focus and framing slightly from film to film, and in the manner of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, giving successive revelations in each new telling which upend or subvert much of what you thought you knew about these people and their lives. "Appearances can be deceiving," one character notes, and so we see, for example, in film three, how certain choices are wrongly interpreted by characters who don't share our advantage, after all, of having seen films one and two. Unlike Kieslowski's film series, which though different in matter were relatively uniform in tone, La Trilogy goes from gripping drama to a lighter, comedic touch. On the Run follows an escaped prison lifer who has Terminator-like tenacity, both physically and mentally. An Amazing Couple focuses on two people whose marriage gets in trouble only when they let their fears get out of control. After Life plunges us into the ethical nether-world of a cop whose real-world navigation of compromises and scruples makes him the most complex character of the series. No doubt Belvauz could easily give us another film or two on the same characters again, filling in gaps, though even then, we one senses some mysteries would remain unsolved. And it would no longer be The Trilogy.

GREECE
HARD GOODBYES: MY FATHER
Dyskoli apochairetismi: obabas mou
DIRECTOR: PENNY PANAYOTOPOULOU
How appropriate that a story that takes place in the shadow of the Apollo moon landing, is set in Athens, where Apollo ruled as the god of knowledge and light. Yet this movie is set in other shadows as well: stingily-lit compositions and a slowly unfolding narrative may cause some to decide this film is too somber and dark; I found it an understated gem. The relationship between Christos and his younger son Elias is reminiscent of Roberto Benigni and the child who played his son in Life Is Beautiful: their exchanges are characterized by vivid storytelling, easy communication, and joy. Not so the man's relationship with his older son, Aris, or his wife: aloofness or open hostility is the rule there. When Christos, a ne'r do well vacuum cleaner salesman, makes a rare appearance at home, the boys block out the tension between their parents in their own particular ways. When tragedy strikes, Elias is particularly affected, and uses his rich powers of imagination to block out a painful reality by spinning richly-detailed fantasies. Yet poetry is lies that tell the truth, and the boy's imaginative impulse not only takes him to a new place of maturity, but is the catalyst for personal breakthroughs by the others in his life. As dense and disciplined as a well-crafted short story, with stray lines of dialogue rooted deep in a history for which the screen action is just the surface, this moving film was one of my favorites at the festival.

ROMANIA/FRANCE
PHILANTHROPY
Filanthropica
DIRECTOR: NAE CARANFIL
A middle-aged schoolteacher named Ovidu whose life and would-be writing career are going nowhere is drawn into a wild scam (run by a mysterious Don Pepe). The scam involves going with a woman posing as his wife into restaurants, and getting strangers to feel sorry for them and so pay their huge bills for meals never really ordered, and split the take with the waiter. Besides the fact he lives with (and off) his parents, Ovidu is motivated to participate in the scam by his love for Diana, the beautiful star of television toothpaste commercials, whose love he hopes to win by posing as a rich playboy whose novels have sold as well as he always dreamed they would. Seeing Ovidu's fully-globalized classroom (somebody's phone rings and everybody in the class checks theirs) is enough to let you know there is some serious gap between generations (if not dimensions) in these post-Communist states. The notion of having to prostitute oneself for Don Pepe in order to survive lets you know how globalism looks to many. The notion that stories are only good to squeeze money out of suckers is pretty good summation of postmodernism. As raw and sad as a gypsy funeral dance, but an ending that offers a pro-active postmodern twist on the notion that if you can't lick 'em join 'em.

ITALY
WINTER
L'Inverno
DIRECTOR: NINA DI MAJO
Like Bergman's Winter Light, this is a film involving a crisis of faith: in this case, faith in art and life. Leo is a successful writer, but he's unable to communicate to his longtime companion Marta much of anything - let alone the deep despair he feels as an increased consciousness of his mortality turns his inner life into a frozen wasteland. Marta runs a gallery but is a fragile woman who fears her life and relationship with Leo is dissolving for reasons she can't understand. Their next-door neighbors - whose winter seems even colder and deeper - only make things worse. Anna's husband, an artist, but a generation older than the others, makes a pass at Marta and Anna seems so desperate for any kind of intimacy that she grasps after it in all directions. As the film progresses, the walls close in and the silence deepens for all: a bleak and chilly cinematic experience.