I had the opportunity to speak with Sam Flancher, programmer of the Chicago International Film Festival, about the free summer screenings they held for the first half of the summer at the Chicago History Museum, and will be continuing at the Chicago Cultural Center throughout the end of the summer season. All films that are in the program are a directed by women! What a great way to celebrate their upcoming 60th festival season. Don’t miss your opportunity to see these amazing films! Learn more.
What was the inspiration for celebrating female filmmakers for your 60th anniversary?
Every year, we join our consulate and community partners in brainstorming themes for our summer screenings, and we ask everyone for their input. The showcase of women filmmakers has always been a popular idea. This year leading up to our 60th anniversary, we thought it was a great year for it. An exciting part of this program is that these are filmmakers whose work has been shown at the festival before in some form. We honor these filmmakers by showing some of their early works, either a short film or their first feature. Because we are celebrating our festival history, we thought what better way to do that than to celebrate the women who have been part of the festival for the past few years?
Can you talk about your collaboration with the Chicago History Museum and the Chicago Cultural Center in hosting these free screenings?
The Chicago History Museum collaboration came about when they were renovating the Claudia Cassidy Theater at the Chicago Cultural Center. We needed a venue for half of our summers screenings. This was a couple years ago. So we reached out to a couple different places, including the Chicago History Museum. We wanted to work with them for a very long time and this was a good opportunity to do that. We loved hosting screenings there so much that we’ve kept on doing it. It’s really been a wonderful space, especially with the summer screenings program. Part of the mission of summer screenings is to introduce people to international cinema. Because all of the screenings are free, this is a great entry way for them. The Chicago History Museum promotes along with their members in their constituency. And they aren’t necessarily film centric people who the screenings are being promoted to, but I think a lot of their members have enjoyed the screenings as well.
Can you talk about some of the programming coming up? I’m really excited about “Sibyl” (Justine Triet) and “The Chambermaid” (Lila Avilés) because I’ve interviewed both of those filmmakers.
It’s a really varied and kind of eclectic program. It’s nice when the theme is not exactly genre-specific. This allows us to present all different kinds of films. The two that you mentioned are kind of special because we screened both Justine Triet’s film “Anatomy of a Fall” and Lila Avilés’ film “Totem” for our 2023 festival. “Sibyl,” in particular is a film I really love, and it didn’t really receive a theatrical release. Claudia Cassidy is a really beautiful theater, and I’m excited to bring the film to that venue. I love how complicated and messy the film is.
But I’m really excited about all of the films, so it’s hard to choose a favorite. Our very last screening, I feel, is going to be really a special one. It’s a Swedish-theme short film showcase of animated films by Niki Lindroth von Bahr. I spent five years as the head of the short film program for the Chicago International Film Festival, and have loved her films forever. It’s really this kind of deadpan Swedish sense of humor. She uses puppets and stop motion animation. Two of the four films are hilarious, existentialist musicals, but very Swedish and very sad too. I love summer screenings because we have no other context in which we can present her work. Also, two of the four films that we are presenting screened at the festival, but two had not. It’s nice to group them all together, and it’s about an hour-long.
I think this is great because international short films don’t really get seen!
And the films are free too! I mean, we get over five thousand short film submissions a year. There are so many! And our program is so good every year, so we’re hoping to create some short film fans at the fest this year. We have three blocks of short films and we want to get people hyped about the work.
What do you hope people see in this year’s programming, besides the obvious fact that they are really great films?
I don’t know if there is something specific, but I do hope people are able to catch multiple films in the program. I think the program is unique. It is great because we are looking forward and then backward at the same time. We are seeing more recent work from filmmakers, rather than older, but I’m particularly excited about seeing short films from filmmakers’ work that we’ve had at the festival before.
The Australian short film program showcasing Australian filmmakers whose features we’ve screened is amazing. I don’t think those collections and opportunities happen that often. Let’s go back a few years and see what their work was like before they were big!
