PAYDAY
dir. Daryl Duke, 1973
100 mins. United States.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 2 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, AUGUST 15 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, AUGUST 18 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 31 – MIDNIGHT

ONLINE TICKETS       FACEBOOK EVENT

“If you can’t smoke it, drink it, spend it, or love it… Forget it.”

While it’s not possible to honor the passing of every fallen hero of ours at 124 South 3rd Street, we’re thrilled to salute the departed Elmore Rual “Rip Torn” Jr. (1931-2019) by shining a light on one of his absolute greatest performances, as Maury Dann – a hellraising honeydripper outrunning his past one 95-mile-per-hour at a time in the underrated 1973 drama PAYDAY, directed by Daryl Duke (who made the phenomenal THE SILENT PARTNER a few years later, with Elliot Gould and Donald Sutherland.)

Having achieved a measure of fame with a minor hit single, Dann’s life is a string of saloon gigs and one-night stands, propelled by bourbon and propped up by pills; while he’s making arguable headway in the music business, his problems keep piling up on the margins. His manager McGinty (Michael C. Gwyne) and girlfriend Mayleen (Ahna Capri), both long-suffering, bear witness to his bouts of rage and capriciousness, yet stay the course from one Alabama tussle to the next. Dann is certainly a character the performatively woke film critics of 2019 would call “unsympathetic”, yet Torn’s signature tortured charisma makes it make sense: in this decrepit economy of also-rans, hangers-on and the earnestly pure of heart, Maury is the most exciting thing anybody’s got going on.

Not for the faint of stomach, PAYDAY spans 36 hours in the life of a man who can’t stop hurting others (or himself), a classic story rendered in unforgettable Alabama texture. Produced by pioneering rock critic Ralph Gleason, with songs written by Shel Silverstein and an endlessly quotable screenplay by the great novelist Don Carpenter (Hard Rain Falling), PAYDAY never got a proper national release despite widespread critical acclaim; it’s exactly the kind of offbeat 70s slice-of-life cinema that attracted the interest of restless, status-quo bucking artists like Rip Torn. “You only pass through life once… Might as well be in a Cadillac.

“PAYDAY holds you in fascination. The totality of Rip Torn’s inspiring portrait is overwhelming.” – Judith Crist, New York Magazine

“Brilliant. Impressive. Awesome. Extraordinary.” – The New York Times

“PAYDAY is a great fucking movie.” – Nick Tosches, Creem

Special thanks to the Saul Zaentz Company.

THIS MAGNIFICENT CAKE!
dir. Marc James Roels & Ema de Swaef, 2018
44 mins. Belgium.
In Dutch, French, Aka, and Malinke with English subtitles.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 16 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, AUGUST 29 – 10 PM

ONLINE TICKETS       FACEBOOK EVENT

An official selection at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, Toronto International Film Festival and Telluride Film Festival, THIS MAGNIFICENT CAKE! (CE MAGNIFIQUE GÂTEAU!) is an unforgettable work of stopmotion animation exploring the bitter milieu of Belgium-occupied Congo.

In the late 19th century, keen to compete with other European imperial powers on the continent, King Leopold II of Belgium proclaimed, “I do not want to miss a good chance of getting us a slice of this magnificent African cake.” The subsequent occupation of the Congo would come to attract a contingent of servants, merchants and miscellaneous bourgeois driven by everything from insatiable greed to existential fear. From the intimate stories of these characters — many of whom pass through a luxury hotel in the middle of the jungle – emerges a greater narrative concerning the imperialist mentality.

In a film by turns surreal, darkly comic and brutal, directors Marc James Roels and Emma de Swaef ultimately turn their critical gaze on the colonists themselves in a work of stunning, mysterious beauty.

Presented by GKIDS.

playing with:
THE BURDEN
Niki Lindroth von Bahr, 2017
14 min., Swedish w/ English subs

OH WILLY…
Marc James Roels & Emma de Swaef, 2012,
17 min., No dialogue

Festivals and Awards: Quinzaine des Réalisateurs – Cannes 2018, Telluride Film Festival – 2018, TIFF – Special Jury Mention, Annecy Animation Film Festival, Animafest Zagreb – Best Feature Film Grand Prix, Ottawa Animation Film Festival – Feature Grand Prix

THE TRIAL
(O PROCESSO)
dir. Maria Augusta Ramos, 2018
140 mins. Brazil/Germany/Netherlands.
In Brazilian Portuguese with English subtitles.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 4 – 5 PM followed by remote Q&A with filmmaker Maria Augusta Ramos
NEW YORK CITY PREMIERE – ONE NIGHT ONLY!
(This event is $10.)

ONLINE TICKETS       FACEBOOK EVENT

In August 2016, Dilma Rousseff – survivor of torture at the hands of the Brazilian dictatorship, the first female head of state in the country’s history, and hand-picked successor to the wildly popular (later imprisoned) president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – came under scrutiny from Brazil’s lower house of Congress after being accused of corruption and nepotism. Led by her longtime rival Michel Temer and the speaker of Brazil’s lower house of congress, Eduardo Cunha, the subsequent impeachment trial became a “parliamentary coup”, whereby right-wing factions sought to discredit the Rousseff administration to consolidate power in the Senate and refract media attention from their own conflicts of interest. (In his own right, Temer would be accused of corruption by Brazil’s Attorney General in 2017; Cunha himself had already been indicted for laundering millions for personal gain in concert with Petrobras, the country’s semi-public oil powerhouse, and would be imprisoned the same year.) Among the politicians who came out against Rousseff was Brazil’s current president Jair Bolsonaro, who dedicated his vote to Carlos Brilhante Ustra, the dictatorship-era colonel who supervised the unit where Rousseff had been imprisoned and tortured.

A veteran documentarian with a keen eye for the machinations of law, Maria Augusta Ramos embedded herself within Rousseff’s legal team to capture her country’s still-young democratic institutions shaken daily by obstructionism and revanchism. Was the Truth and Reconciliation process a sham? Did Rousseff really have the following she claimed among feminists? Would it all have been different if her reelection in 2014 hadn’t been contested by her enemies? How did anti-corruption become the focus of right-wing populists? Assembled from 450 hours of material shot during the impeachment proceedings, THE TRIAL is a dizzying, Kafkaesque and nailbiting portrayal of power politics by any means necessary.

“Undermining the power of democratic institutions—that’s what Trump is trying to do now. In Brazil, when you impeach a president who hasn’t committed a crime, that is unconstitutional. You make this process appear pseudolegitimate when it is in fact a farce playing out in a theater of politics. The trial was a sham that has caused a certain crisis of legitimacy. They weakened democratic institutions in ways that have had unintended consequences; to eliminate an opponent, they undermined the very institutions that were legitimizing them. The recent elections in Brazil are a sign of how these institutions have stopped working. When they talk about upholding the Constitution . . . it’s empty performance. It’s an emotional, sensationalist gesture that feeds a nationalist and pseudopatriotic feeling, which is fascist. The trial was not about justice, it was not a search for truth. It was designed to make everything confusing and distorted. It’s just a downright lie. It’s exactly what Bolsonaro does, it’s what Trump does.” – Maria Augusta Ramos, interviewed by Nilo Couret in Film Quarterly

“Remarkable. Riveting. A crucial record of the travesty behind the impeachment hearings of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff.” – Variety

“THE TRIAL is horrifyingly prescient. It is a film about power, corruption and reality, one that captures the atmosphere of unease and chaos that seems to dominate our 24/7 news cycle…. Ramos, who mentions the traditions of Dutch documentary filmmaking as a major influence, similarly draws on the works some of the great Dutch painters. There’s the casual grandeur of Rembrandt, the focused order of Vermeer and the chaotic lines of Van Gogh in her work… The Trial is a perfect articulation for the current political climate around the world.” – Little White Lies

“Under a veneer of legality and constitutionality, the process was one of bribery, blackmail and violence. Car Wash (Lava Jato), the biggest anti-corruption operation in history, somehow brought the country’s most corrupt individuals to power, as did its blueprint, Operation Clean Hands (Mani Pulite) in 1990s Italy… [THE TRIAL] manages to convey that despite Dilma not being implicated or charged in Lava Jato, it provided a pretext for her impeachment as if she was. Enabled by Rousseff-endorsed changes to the law intended to facilitate the pursuit of corruption, Lava Jato in turn damaged the economy so sharply that it provided another pretext, with the exacerbated recession and resulting unemployment used as auxiliary by supporters and corporate PR whenever doubt was cast upon the impeachment case itself.” – Brasil Wire

MARIA AUGUSTA RAMOS studied documentary film in Amsterdam and has been a guest at festivals worldwide since the start of her career. Her films have received multiple awards. Her film Justice (2004) won the Grand Prix at the Swiss festival Visions du Réel and the Amnesty Award at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen, among other prizes. In 2007, her film Behave premiered at the Locarno Film Festival and was honoured with the FIPRESCI Award at DOK Leipzig and the Grand Prix at One World Int. Doc Festival in Prague. Her most recent film The Trial celebrated its world premiere in Panorama at the 2018 Berlinale, and also received the Grand Prix at Visions du Réel, Best Film at DocumentaMadrid, Best film by the Silvestre jury and the Audience Award at IndieLisboa and Best film at Buenos Aires Int. Doc Festival. In 2013, the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights honoured Maria Ramos with the Marek Nowicki Prize for her examination of the subject human rights in film.

Special thanks to Grasshopper Film and Rodrigo Brandão (The Intercept).

FRIDAY, JULY 20 – 7:30 PM:
with No Evil Eye creators Rooney Elmi and Ingrid Raphael in person for Q&A with Nuotama Bodomo and Sahal Hassan (THIS EVENT IS $10)
MONDAY, JULY 22 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, JULY 28 – 5 PM

ONLINE TICKETS      FACEBOOK EVENT

Frustrated by the lack of multicultural, leftist film spaces in Central Ohio, local political organizers and ‘zinesters Rooney Elmi and Ingrid Raphael decided to co-create NO EVIL EYE, a radical micro-cinema that aims to redefine the creative and social parameters of non-metropolitan film scenes. By curating an eclectic mix of films from up-and-coming and emerging filmmakers with a mission to represent their respective audiences and build a healthy counterculture.

No Evil Eye’s inaugural film program, Sequence 01, explores the theme of diasporic reckoning through landscapes, legacy, and memory. This curated edition forms a lyrical mediation on race, class, and migration that mirrors the growing immigrant community and changing landscape in New York City

NEE is actively spearheading a physical space that fosters the union between the personal and the political with the great hope of igniting a radical imagination around the moving image by promoting a realistic yet utopian vision of cinema as a space of socio-political possibilities.

LANDMARK
dir. Sahal Hassan, 2018
4 mins.

A meditation on public space and public memory in the shadow of chattel slavery.

CONFRONTATIONS
dir. Natasha Woods, 2018
11 mins.

Tracing a mother’s journey from Brazil to Iowa for a better life analogous to the makers’ return to Iowa after leaving for more opportunity. A documented attempt to understand relationships of personhood, memory, life, and death.

DISINTEGRATION 93-96
dir. Miko Revereza, 2017
5 mins.

The insecurities and pent-up emotions of an Filipino immigrant in the USA give way to political ruminations and critical commentaries on the colonization of the mind by the American Dream.

HOW DID HOME RECEIVE YOU?
dir. Claudia Owusu, 2018
3 mins.

A reflection on what’s like for the immigrant to finally return home, the weight of a dual identity, and lastly, how home receives the immigrant’s return.

HERAT IN MY HEAD IN MY HEART
dir. Weeda Azim, 2016
2 mins.

A long-distance telephone call from Canada to Afghanistan remedies misplaced cultural nostalgia and soothes the pain of war in this avant-garde short.

YOU WILL BE MY ALLY
dir. Rosine Mbakam, 2017
20 mins.

In our only narrative short of the program, Cameroonian-Belgian filmmaker, Rosine Mbakam profiles an African woman, played by Bwanga Pilipili, facing a grueling interrogation at a European airport.

AFRONAUTS
dir. Nuotama Bodomo, 2014
14 mins.

Zambians try to make it to the moon in the 1960s.

Design by Sarah Z. Mamo / Concept by No Evil Eye. 

CHICAGOLAND SHORTS VOL. 5
dir. Various. 78 minutes.

TUESDAY, JULY 2 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, JULY 10 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, JULY 21 – 5 PM
TUESDAY, JULY 30 – 7:30 PM w/Chicagoland programmer Raul Benitez in person for Q&A!
(This event is $10.)

ONLINE TICKETS      FACEBOOK EVENT

Established in 2015, Chicagoland Shorts is Full Spectrum Features’ annual touring short film collection that highlights the incredible diversity of The Windy City and its surrounding communities. Featuring the best of women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ filmmakers, this traveling anthology has screened across Cook County and nationally from Seattle to New York. The artists in our collections are diverse, prolific, genre-bending, and quintessentially Chicago.

The fifth volume of Full Spectrum Features’ Chicagoland Shorts anthology offers a look into different worlds, with films spanning genres of narrative, experimental, and docu-fantasy, the collection will take you from an 8-year-old’s nightmares to the last remaining freed slave settlement. Artists in our collection include a Sundance Documentary Fellow, a Fulbright-García Robles Foundation Award recipient, and a Cannes award-winning director.

I MISS JAMIE WHEN SHE’S GONE
dir. Ashley Thompson
16 mins.

Two estranged sisters return to the suburbs of Chicago ten months after their father’s sudden death to clean out their childhood home.

SMART NIGHTMARES
dir. Marisa Tolomeo. 5 mins.

Hannah narrates her nightmares, while her family argues on who’s to blame for her creepy internet searches.

HALL OF FISHES
dir. Jennifer Boles. 9 mins.

An immersive archival film about the limits of visual knowledge and the webs of power and violence behind our desires to see, contain, and consume the ocean.

SHEEBOP! SHEEBOP! SHEEBOP!
dir. Jiayi Chen & Cameron Worden. 3 mins.

A trip to Florida spurs taxonomical speculation.

SCALING QUELCCAYA
dir. Meredeith Leich. 7 mins.

A surreal exploration of a melting glacier in Peru and an altered future in Chicago, weaving together 3D animation, satellite imagery, archival NASA footage, and speculative math about climate and snow.

EXODUS: SOUNDS OF THE GREAT MIGRATION
dir. Lonnie Edwards. 12 mins.

Told through live performance, dance and spoken word, Exodus looks into how the Great Migration gave birth to many artists that influenced and empowered black culture.

PALENQUE
dir. Sebastián Pinzón Silva. 25 mins.

Guided by motifs of life and death, PALENQUE is an ode to a small town that has greatly contributed to the collective memory of Colombia: San Basilio de Palenque, the first town in the Americas to have broken free from European domination.

Chicagoland Shorts Vol. 5 was curated by Raul Benitez (Comfort Station), Emily Eddy (Onion City) and Melika Bass (Creature Companion) and includes the latest films by acclaimed local filmmakers as well as debut works by emerging voices.

Full Spectrum Features is a Chicago-based 501(c)(3) nonprofitorganization committed to increasing diversity in themedia arts by producing, exhibiting, and supporting the work of women, LGBTQ, and minority filmmakers.