(Ethan Tate)

As you enter the apartment at 55th and Hyde Park, the projector is on your left. Straight ahead, a canvas covered with what looks like multi-colored sponges hangs on a wall. When I ask about it, Julian Antos urges me to take it off their hands: “I just hate feeling like my home is an art project.”

Sponges aside, the apartment that Julian shares with Rebecca Hall feels like an extension of their own project—the Northwest Chicago Film Society (NWCFS), a nonprofit they and a third partner, Kyle Westphal, started in January 2011. According to its mission statement, the Society “exists to promote the preservation of film in context.” Its founders believe that film’s “ability to capture the past uniquely” is more “intelligible when it’s grounded in unsimulated experience: seeing a film in a theater, with an audience, and projected from film stock.” To achieve this goal, the NWCFS runs a classic film series on Wednesday nights for five-dollar admission at the Portage Theater on North Milwaukee.

In addition to the series up north, Becca and Julian host occasional screenings in their apartment, drawing films from their vast personal collection. Though they emphasize the difference between their living room screenings and the society’s public series at the Portage, Becca points out the new NWCFS logo she designed and spray-painted onto her bedroom door. Julian offers a cookie from the open packet of Chips Ahoy sitting on the kitchen table, brought to the previous day’s screening by one of their “favorite patrons.”

The weekly series at the Portage draws a crowd of regulars, many of whom first got to know Becca and Julian when the screenings were held on Saturdays in the now-empty Bank of America Cinema. That program, the Classic Film Series, began in 1972, and persisted in that space around the corner from the Portage as the building’s owners and the programmers changed over the years.

Becca discovered the Bank of America Cinema as a University of Chicago student through her involvement with Doc Films, the university’s student-run film society. “It was legendary among the [Doc] board in 2007,” Becca says. “Once I got to know them, I got to tag along.” She describes it as having “a really weird set up.” According to Becca, “You had to walk around to the back of the building, and there was this quaint little movie theater lobby.”

Becca soon began working at the cinema, and that is where she and Julian first met. “Julian, in my head, was that happy kid who would come with his parents and buy popcorn from me,” she says. Michael Phillips, who now runs South Side Projections and programmed at the cinema for its last few years, eventually brought Julian on to help out. According to Becca, he thought having a high-school kid around would annoy her, but the two quickly became friends. “He was like, ‘I’m going to screen this print of “The Black Cat” in my basement,’” Becca remembers, before asking Julian: “There was a live performance aspect, right? Your parents’ weird friends’ children?”

Both the programmers and patrons were conscious of the cinema’s uncertain fate. “People kept saying that every season for the last year and a half of the Bank was the last one,” Becca says. They began exploring options for continuing the series at a new location. “We were holding out on incorporating [as a nonprofit] until we found a space,” she says. They were introduced to Dennis Wolkowicz, the owner of the Portage Theater, who runs the Silent Film Society in that location. The last screening at the Bank took place on December 18th, 2010, and the NWCFS officially incorporated as a nonprofit on January 21st.

“It was clear that Dennis wanted to see us doing things at the theater,” says Becca. “His love is old films. I think he likes seeing cultural history-oriented programming happening.” In one post on the Society’s blog, Kyle describes the “archaeological aims” of programming a calendar.

“Maybe that’s what we should have called it, the Archaeological Film Society—everyone would think we show dinosaur movies,” says Julian. Neither Becca nor Julian remembers exactly what made them settle on the moniker “Northwest Chicago.” “We didn’t have much time when we were getting started,” Becca says. “I thought it was because we kept fighting and wanted to stop fighting,” Julian responds.

Julian has been collecting film since he was sixteen. The apartment he and Becca share was inherited from a former Doc Films Programming Chair, and the collection is stored in his old bedroom. The room is small and narrow, making the humidity level and 60-degree temperature easier to maintain. It barely fits two desks, a shelf that’s “half-organized,” and a closet holding canisters upon canisters.

“Julian’s just temperamentally a projectionist, he yearns to be in a small dark room with machines,” says Becca. Her interest in film preservation began when she began projecting at Doc Films. “As I was learning, I started hearing little things, sometimes from Kyle, about how because of digital technology’s rise, film stock might not be around for so long. So I was thinking about this the whole time I was learning about it, and these came together to make it seem quite important,” she said in an interview with Michael Phillips for the Chicago Tribune. “We’re still waiting to see if 35 mm, especially, continues to be available from conventional sources, so we’re looking at a lot of ways to make sure that we can keep doing that, including amassing our own film collection.”

****

Kyle, who works at the George Eastman House, the museum of photography and film in Rochester, New York, writes regularly for the Society’s blog. He has devoted a series of posts to the importance of 35mm as it relates to their mission. In a blog post titled “Programming: How To Do Things With Films”, Kyle writes that “the industry-wide switch from 35mm to DCP exhibition is expected to be completed in the next two years.” The Digital Cinema Package, according to a February article in The Atlantic, is “a collection of media files with specifications set by the Digital Cinema Initiatives, a joint venture between Disney, Fox, Paramount, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal, and Warner Bros.”

The cost of the equipment used to project these files amounts to over $75,000—a bill impossible for many small theaters to foot. “These exhibitors are clinging to 35mm because it allows them to use existing projection equipment with minimal and rather predictable maintenance costs. It’s an incidental objective,” Kyle writes. “Showing films in 35mm is a mission on a different level of magnitude for repertory venues.”

In the interview with Phillips, he explains that the “film history that we’re often interested in, this very material physical sense of film history, is where you’re learning something not just by seeing it on screen but by actually holding it in your hand, winding through it, and making, in many ways, artistic decisions about how to present it.”

These decisions are evident in the Society’s choice of venue—“We talk about different series that’d be good for the Portage, or good for Cinema Borealis,” says Becca. The Borealis is a small independent screening room in Wicker Park. They talk about a recent five-hour program they screened there called “TV on Film,” explaining how 16 mm prints were used in television broadcasts. Julian recalls a screening of “The Incident,” a 1967 movie, featuring a young Martin Sheen, about young punks taking over a subway car. Because of the Borealis’ proximity to the Damen “El” station, “you could hear the train going by.”

“At an older theater it becomes a different kind of experience,” Becca says of the Portage and Bank of America. She describes the films in that series, a series which continues “in spirit” at the Portage, as “classic but obscure.” Former Bank of America Cinema programmer Mike King wrote in a goodbye tribute posted on Cinephile, a website devoted to Chicago independent cinema, that the series was a testament to the fact that “in order to fully grasp American film history, you have to venture well beyond the canon.”

He goes on to write that though the Bank showed “mostly old movies to mostly old people, the Bank [was] no nostalgia house.” What’s special about the movie-watching experience at the bank or Portage does not only have to do with the choice of film, or even just the fact that it’s on 35mm: “Take a film like ‘The Lady From Shanghai,’” King wrote. “When it plays at Doc Films at the University of Chicago, the undergrads laugh straight through it, to prove how smart they are. Go see it at Gene Siskel Film Center, and nobody laughs at all, as if they are humbled by how smart the film is. At the Bank, people would laugh along with the jokes. But also chuckle at first hearing Orson Welles’ wretched fake Irish accent. Because it’s funny.”

The NWCFS’s mission statement speaks lovingly of “the creak of the seats, the smile of the concession stand girl, the ripped edges of a ticket.” It continues, “going to the movies should mean more than watching a consumer product violently cajoled into filling a theater screen….We believe that it is an experience—aesthetic, material, social, and moral—worth preserving.”

Now, however, the Portage is threatened. CBS 2 reports that a North Side church, the Christian Tabernacle, has offered $2 million for the building, which contains the theater and a few storefronts. The Commission on Chicago Landmarks gave the theater “preliminary landmark status” in early April, and the Zoning Board of Appeals met on April 20 to address the issue. According to the Portage’s website, the church proposes “to convert the theater into their worship space, remove the marquee, alter the auditorium, and eliminate the storefronts and half the apartments.”

Community members and 45th Ward Alderman John Arena are rallying around the historic theater, writing letters to the Zoning Board of Appeals protesting the church’s request for a special use permit to allow for religious services in the theater. The Portage’s website urges community members to attend the Board’s June 15 meeting where the proposal is to be considered.

****

But for now, Julian has just found his “intermission reel”—a collection of old advertisements for concessions he’s spliced together—and he wants to watch it. The apartment’s screening area is currently doubling as a bedroom for one of their roommates; a button-down hangs next to the screen and a desk is in the corner. The couches sit on a stage left by the apartment’s previous occupants. There’s a crash as Julian loads the film. “You scared the cats!” Becca yells from the couch.

“I feel like it still hasn’t sunk in for the general public yet, that there’s a person literally making the show happen,” she says. On the website, they’ve collected pictures of projectors drawn by projectionists. Their answer to the anticipated question —“Why this project?” reads: “Because the future of the medium is particularly uncertain these days, we’d like to record a sense of the skill and affection involved in every level of the trade.”

Becca talks seriously about her “fantasy,” that someday “repertory screenings will get their due;” that listings, the general public, and film critics will acknowledge the difficulty of obtaining certain prints, the particular choices programmers make, the combination of visceral experience and cultural history that lend these films a unique value beyond the stories they tell. “But we still believe in concessions,” Julian jokes. “Popcorn is economically important.” Becca adds that the Portage serves beer, wine, and hot dogs. “People don’t know that!”

“Evil is Interesting,” on view at Pilsen’s Antena gallery, professes to “interrogate the seductiveness and glamour of evil.” Michael Workman and Antidote Projects curated the project, which features film, installation art, and interactive pieces by twelve local artists.

Evil does tend to intrigue us: its je-ne-sais-quoi makes it a subject for popular exploration and multivalent interpretation. Its high visibility in modern life has made the idea of evil pack a smaller punch, lose a bit of its taboo, and become somehow charming, Workman suggests.

One installation displays a computer screen repeating Google searches over and over: “loud evil laugh,” “I think I am evil,” “Evel Knievel is dead,” and “my puppy is evil.” However, the pieces that consider suffering, or the display of instruments of evil, like the baseball bat slowly revolving while hanging low from the ceiling, work to dispel the notion that evil has any kind of innocent charisma.

Workman calls the exhibition a concept album in “a totalized environment… between the context of the space itself, all the various different media, videos, net art, the play, a music soundtrack, and the zine.” Due to technical difficulties (perhaps an unintended form of evil), the zine in question is not yet available, and the play’s loose script has yet to be released in print.

The 40-minute dramatic performance, titled “A Conversion,” was set in the gallery space, centered on a red couch, a red carpet, a black coffee table, and a blue dining table. According to Workman, the play is in that “60s, 70s vein of experimental theatre,” with improvised dialogue. The organic veracity of the production is accomplished by its actors’ off-the-cuff and intimate delivery.

The play concerns four characters, each defined by their jobs: Vivian the artist, Ellie the poet, Joyce the sex worker, and Gavin the hedge fund manager. Each offers a take on evil—Vivian attempts to grapple with the actions of her brother, a soldier who killed an unarmed civilian while deployed in Afghanistan. In his defense, Vivian declares that she’s ”trying to tell you this fucked up thing that happened because of the situation he was in, not because of him. All he was doing was doing his job.”

Workman explained, “The brother’s done something that ostensibly is evil, but in service of a better world.” The artist and actress Sarah Weis, who contributed the candle and computer piece and played Vivian, said, “I think she’s the most empathetic of the characters, and also… the most human, and in a way the weakest.”  The central concern of the play seemed to be the characters’ confrontations with the evil in themselves, their jobs, and their lives.

To facilitate this interaction, the script calls for one character to pause in the middle of a sex scene to “address the audience to tell them that she loves them, all the members of the audience the same way, as if they were inside her, too.”

A collection of silent films also works its way into the show.  In “The Language of the Enemy,” Zolten Gera narrates his experience being abused in prison through subtitles, cast over a montage of disembodied hand signs and gestures. In another piece, “Modern Romance,” a woman fidgets in front of the camera while a man describes a “brutal seduction,” once again via subtitles.

Throughout the exhibition, Workman pursued a “narratological” comment on how people interact with evil in their lives. “As the curator I’m saying we’ve built in this ambiguity with [evil], but more importantly, the focus is… the seductiveness of it,” he explained. The exhibition examines inner conflict, moral ambiguity, and where the two intersect with what is seen as evil, perverse, and threatening. At the end of the not-so-cohesive message, it’s unclear if we ought to be disturbed by evil’s prevalence, or entertained by its kitsch. Antena, 1765 S. Laflin St. Through April 21. Hours by appointment. Free. (773)340-3516. antenapilsen.com. An encore performance of the play is planned for Friday, April 20 at 6:00

Rachel Wiseman & lindsaybanks/flickr

[Show as slideshow]

The dusty green and yellow “Ramova” marquee straddles a now unused entrance at the corner of 35th and South Halsted. Inside the Ramova Theater, founded in 1929, the Spanish-style auditorium gives way to what was once a midnight blue ceiling, studded with stars that glittered as Charlie Chaplin graced the silver screen. When the marquee was less dusty, childhood classics like Bambi and famous American blockbusters like Jaws played under that night sky until the Ramova closed in 1986. In 2001, the city took over the building—seemingly the final nail in a coffin containing a piece of Bridgeport’s history.

But Bridgeport resident Maureen Sullivan is striving to regain control. Born and raised in Bridgeport, the friendly yet fiercely committed Sullivan remembers her weekly trips to the Ramova Theater to watch the latest releases. Like countless other Bridgeport and Chicago residents, the Ramova is central to Sullivan’s childhood recollections, a treasured memory that has stayed with her since her youth.

“Almost everyone who has lived in the neighborhood during the last few decades has been inside the Ramova,” said Sullivan. “The theater was a focal part of this extremely vibrant life in Bridgeport that no one ever forgot, even after it was shut down.”

The vibrancy Sullivan speaks of harkens back to the 1970s, when Mexican, Chinese, and Lithuanian-Americans transformed Bridgeport into a multi-ethnic community, a place that for many constituted the quintessential Chicago neighborhood. Nowadays, the area has been a political and cultural hotbed, enticing more and more young college grads looking for affordable, safe housing.

Yet despite the influx of new residents, the stretch along South Halsted near the Ramova is somewhat bleak. Starting as far back as seven years ago, the city government began tearing down buildings near the Ramova, erasing much of the block’s former grandeur.  Though new construction projects—like the block-long condo development on 35th street—replaced the old buildings, empty lots still dot the area, and city officials remain unsure about the future of any further development.

Alarmed by the city’s intervention, Sullivan was determined to prevent the Ramova’s demolition in order to protect Bridgeport’s cultural history. In 2005, Sullivan started a petition to fight for the theater’s survival, aiming to safeguard a building that holds so much cultural value for the city and sentimental value for many Bridgeport residents.

What began as a petition grew into a full-blown initiative to not only restore the Ramova but to turn it into a hub of Bridgeport culture. With approximately 4,000 signatures on the petition by both neighborhood residents and backers outside of Bridgeport, Sullivan had gathered enough support for her case to fight for the Ramova’s restoration and reopening.

“The trick was to just keep beating the drum,” Sullivan explains. “We kept pushing the possibility of saving the Ramova out in the open and more people started to remember their days at the theater and how crucial the Ramova was to the arts scene in Bridgeport.”

Sullivan stresses that the nostalgic pull of the space is central to the restoration effort: “The Ramova was the center of entertainment and a lot of childhood memories for people in Bridgeport, and residents bring that up all the time because those memories really matter to them. It was actually a key issue at the alderman debate last year, which goes to show how many people are willing to fight for the Ramova.”

Despite widespread public support for the Ramova’s restoration, obstacles began to appear and push back the project. The economic downturn in 2008 prevented Sullivan from obtaining the necessary resources for a restoration initiative—leaving the project in the planning stages, where dreams can grow and shrink, but nothing physical moves. Furthermore, the city expressed its wish for a private party or non-profit organization to direct the restoration, meaning that city officials and funds would have minimal involvement with the project.

In light of these difficulties, Sullivan redirected her efforts into creating a cohesive support base. This base is the Friends of South Halsted, a non-profit focused on the cultural and commercial renewal of not only the theater but the whole nearby stretch of South Halsted.

While the theater itself holds most of the personal significance that drew in the initial support from the Bridgeport community, outsiders slowly began to recognize the theater’s potential as a focal point for the neighborhood’s wider redevelopment. The power of this vision spurred the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) to get involved in 2010.

Robert Chaney, an undergraduate student at IIT, identified the Ramova as a fitting project for the institution’s Interprofessional Projects Program (IPRO). The Ramova’s restoration offered an excellent opportunity for business, architecture, and arts-oriented IPRO students to receive hands-on experience in their fields by contributing to Bridgeport’s cultural development. After approval from the program coordinators, Chaney and Sullivan teamed up. Students began creating floor plans and working to attract local businesses while Sullivan promoted the cause through “Save the Ramova” fundraisers.

Sullivan’s efforts finally motivated city administrators to contact restoration and theater operations specialist Ray Shepardson, best known for his refurbishment of the Loop’s glittering Chicago Theater.

“When I select which theaters to preserve, part of my criteria involves the theater’s historical importance to their surroundings and the local community’s initiative in getting it back on its feet,” Shepardson explained. “In the Ramova’s case, Maureen’s [built up] that energy already, so my job is to draw up plans that detail what changes to the theater itself will take place, and how it will become economically viable enough to help the community grow.”

Sullivan, Shepardson, and the students aim to develop a creative environment that captures Bridgeport’s past and returning vibrancy, with the Ramova as a symbol connecting the old with the new.

While the run-down theater undergoes renovations, they hope to likewise create an energetic commercial environment along South Halsted by persuading local business owners to set up shop near the Ramova. There’s a big hole to fill—The Ramova Grill, the 82-year-old chili parlor in one of the storefronts attached to the theater, recently announced it is closing on the 14th.

Between the renovation’s economic and cultural aspirations, the end goal is to persuade Chicagoans inside and outside Bridgeport to explore the neighborhood.

“While Bridgeport is still a tight-knit neighborhood, it’s not as close as it used to be when I was growing up because people are going out of the neighborhood for entertainment and shopping,” said Sullivan. “Part of our objective is to keep people in Bridgeport and show them that there is fun to be had in the neighborhood.”

She continued, “It’s very hard to build a neighborhood’s sense of community if the residents are constantly leaving for opportunities outside. So we’re trying to use home-grown economics to revive Bridgeport’s past history as a commercial, entertainment, and artistic hotbed.”

While the Ramova of years past was focused on the silver screen, the Ramova of the future will be a multi-purpose arts venue. The new theater will have its lobby transformed into an art gallery while the auditorium will be a music venue.

The team is ever closer to officially beginning the restoration project. Shepardson and a new cohort of IPRO students continue to draw up building plans, estimate the final costs, and sell the area’s commercial potential to local business-owners. Although prospects have taken a positive turn, Sullivan still organizes Save the Ramova fundraisers to gather even more public support. Her efforts are bearing fruit, as the Ramova’s restoration was one of the top three discussion priorities at a Cultural Plan for Chicago meeting this past week.

While official funding is still hard to come by and the restoration is still under preliminary planning, the team has high hopes that the Ramova marquee will soon glimmer.

Jane Fentress

Steve James has an uncanny ability to defy the observer effect—a force that dictates that mere observation will change the natural course of things. In his films, the director of the documentaries “Hoop Dreams” and “The Interrupters” has been able to recede into the background and let events transpire as if a gaping camera lens were invisible.

“There is no way to test, without the camera being there, to see what would have happened.  Maybe in some alternate universe you could, but I think as a filmmaker what you try to do is spend enough time in a community so that there is a level of comfort,” he said.

In “The Interrupters,” released last year, James gave the United States an intimate and heart-wrenching portrait of one of the most violent years on Chicago’s South Side. The film takes viewers through Englewood: verdant parks, hot dog stands, people chatting on the front steps of two-flats—scenes familiar to any South Side resident. However, shrines memorializing the fallen dot curbs in front of corner stores and alongside boulevards. Bottles of Hennesy, bunches of artificial flowers and Mylar balloons pile beneath handmade posters eulogizing loved ones.

Perhaps this intimacy creates scenes that are too close for the viewer’s comfort. Shots are taken from alongside the hospital bed of a man shot in gang crossfire and alongside the casket of a murdered teenager, baseball cap and folded hands in full view.

“The stories I am attracted to are ones in which I encourage the audience to really think about the story, or someone’s life or someone’s situation and think about it from a complicated place of both trying to understand it and not judge it,” James explains.

“The Interrupters” is James’ most recent film and his sixth documentary with Chicago-based Kartemquin Films. The film follows Ceasefire, a Chicago program that hires former criminals to diffuse potentially violent scenarios in Chicago through peaceful interventions.

James was able to gain such intimate access by building unique trust with his subjects. “The people that you’re dealing with on a regular basis have to trust you,” he says. “The more people feel some sense of control over the situation, paradoxically, the more they will allow you in and give you access to things that are quite intimate.”

“You think [your momma’s] using?” violence interrupter Ameena Matthews whispers to eighteen-year-old Caprysha in the movie. The girl nods solemnly. A later cut shows Ameena and the girl at a nail salon. The camera zooms in as Caprysha admires her new neon-green manicure.

This sort of trust takes time to build.  For “The Interrupters,” James followed Ceasefire for an entire year.  For “Hoop Dreams,” James and his team spent four years following the lives of two high school boys. “When you spend months and even years with someone, there is a sort of different relationship there.”

This is to say, James has put a lot of time into his films over the years. But documentaries weren’t his original destination. “I first fell in love with movies,” James, now 57, said.  He studied radio communications at James Madison University. But a film appreciation class “really kind of sealed the deal.”

“I think documentary sort of blended both my loves: that journalistic impulse with my love of movies.  And so documentaries kinda’ became the thing I did the most.” After gaining a Master’s in communications from Southern Illinois University, James set out to make films of his own. Since 1986, James has directed over a dozen films, TV documentaries, and dramatic films.

“The Interrupters” was inspired by “There are No Children Here,” a book by journalist Alex Kotlowitz exploring the parallels between urban violence and epidemiology. Kotlowitz, incidentally, lives down the block from James in Oak Park, Illinois.  At a certain point, a light went off in James’ head.

“I called him up and I said, ‘I think you’ve really got something here that would make a great basis to do as a documentary,” recounted James. “And so we set about to pursue that.”

James works with a genre of documentary called cinema verité—French for “true cinema.”  But James acknowledges that Truth is a nuanced entity.

“Of course, in the area of truth it is ‘whose truth is it?’ My truth of observing and filming is of necessity a different truth than the people who live in those communities, even those that I am filming. I think for any kind of journalist or filmmaker you have to have an internal compass that guides you in terms of what you think is truthful and honest versus what might just be convenient or dramatic.”

The neighborhoods James investigates are regions of the city that are known for little else aside from urban blight, poverty, and violence—images perpetuated by the evening news and other popular media.

“One of the duties you have as a storyteller is to try and to anticipate the audience’s response to these people that you have documented and do your best to undermine their stereotypes while being true and honest,” he said. “I think part of the goal of making a film or writing a good story is to dig beneath those stereotypes and someone’s contradictions and complexities and present to the audience.”

Yet James acknowledged that he has his own set of stereotypes. “I sometimes need to learn the same kind of lessons over and over again. No matter where you’re from or no matter what your life has been, many of us want the same sorts of things. And that it’s easy to misjudge people when you first meet them. And I’ve done that many times.”

Yet, he says, “It’s exciting actually when your stereotypes get undermined. I think that’s one of the reasons to make films.”

James makes a special effort to get feedback from the people he films, unlike some documentary filmmakers who don’t allow subjects to see the film before it is released.  Not doing so, said James, is “not only wrongheaded but maybe cowardly.”

“I have had situations where subjects were angry about things they saw [in my film],” he admits. “But in all those cases, I came out with respect intact between us because I did what I said I would do: I faced them and heard from them and responded to them.”

James has garnered enough awards to back the currency of a small country—including a premier at Sundance, a retrospective at the International Film Festival Amsterdam, and the Independent Spirit Award for best documentary. “Hoop Dreams,” was dubbed “best film of the 1990’s” by Roger Ebert, and “The Interrupters” has received wide acclaim.

In spite of it all, James simply wishes he were a better filmmaker. “I always wish I was a better filmmaker, but, I mean, I don’t beat myself up about this.”

Cyrus Dowlatshahi

[Show as slideshow]

Cyrus Dowlatshahi is a 30-year-old Hyde Park native, Iranian-American, Vassar alum, and massage therapist. To explore a side of Chicago more often misunderstood than seen, Dowlatshahi is taking on his preferred designation—filmmaker.

The project sounds quite simple—with $25,000 raised from donations on Kickstarter.com, Dowlatshahi is going to film a feature-length documentary about the South Side. He’s not quite sure what he’s looking for, but he wants to document the beauty strangers and residents alike often miss. Working mostly in Englewood and Washington Park, the film will focus on familiar scenes—there will be hair salons, churches, and Fourth of July celebrations.

“There are wonderful things to share and some not-so-wonderful things,” he says, acknowledging the reality of the South Side’s negative image. “I want to help people share the good things. It feels good to tell stories, and when it comes to this project, people are proud of where they come from.”

Dowlatshahi got an unconventional start in filming when he was a student at the UofC Laboratory Schools. After copying the lettering on official UofC vehicles, Dowlatshahi and his friends made a stencil in the same typeface that read, “University of Chicago Secret Police.” They painted this new logo onto Dowlatshahi’s camouflage-print car and began following UCPD and fire activity in Hyde Park and beyond.

“That’s how I started filming,” says Dowlatshahi. “I had a little Handycam, and we’d edit the movies on iMovie. This was the very beginning of cheap digital video software. People were too weirded out for anything bad to happen. It was just too funny for anyone to get upset.” When Dowlatshahi returned from college—with a BA in philosophy and zero credits from the film department—he continued the Secret Police project.

“A friend of mine was in AA and so the only thing to do at night that had nothing to do with alcohol was drive around and make these videos.”

At some point Dowlatshahi’s filmmaking became more than a hobby. To keep making movies, Dowlatshahi went to massage school. He worked as a part-time massage therapist for five years, earning the money he needed to support his filming. But his growing passion needed direction. “After a certain point,” Dowlatshahi says, “I wasn’t submitting movies to festivals or contests, so I knew I needed something else.”

That something else took Dowlatshahi away from the South Side to D.C. and New York. “When I first got to the East Coast, I was an unpaid intern because it was the only way into the business. So, I was 27 and living in my grandma’s basement, interning for a TV production studio.” TV didn’t suit Dowlatshahi, but he eventually worked his way up to Al Jazeera English.

While Dowlatshahi enjoyed working for a major news outlet, he wanted the chance to create his own project. “Of course the dream is to make your own film, to be in control over not only the subject matter but how you tell the story,” he says. “I wanted to control how much of a standard documentary this dream project was or how artsy-fartsy it was. I had to try that and see if people liked it, if it was any good, if it made sense to people who weren’t just my friends and family.”

Dowlatshahi’s first plan was to make a film about Iran, which he visited for the first time in January of last year. However, Dowlatshahi was dissuaded after contacting Iranian filmmakers about the project: “They all wrote me back saying, ‘Dude, you don’t want to do this. It’s a pain. They’re expensive permits.’ Plus, because I’m a dual citizen, I’d have to deal with my military service.”

The South Side of Chicago was an easy second choice. Growing up, Dowlatshahi spent most of his time in Hyde Park. He admits that while he was a kid, he just “didn’t care” about getting to know the surrounding area.  He’s clearly changed his mind. “The area is ripe for documenting,” Dowlatshahi says. “There’s so much here that is awesome. It’s easier, too. I don’t have to buy international plane tickets or deal with the Islamic Republic Film Permit Department. I can just film.”

But it hasn’t exactly been that easy. Chicago also requires film permits, and it costs $400 a day to film in Chicago parks. Dowlatshahi hoped to have the fee waived by offering free photography classes in public parks, but “the City didn’t really go for that.”  While his Kickstarter account helped him raise the $25,000 required to get the project going, he estimates that he will need an additional $40,000 to finish the film. So far, the vast majority of the money has come from family and friends. “This isn’t unusual,” says Dowlatshahi. “All first-time filmmakers get their money from friends and family. It’s a card that I can play one time.”

Family has helped in more ways than one. His mother’s former caretaker, Ethel, is a resident of Englewood. By spending time in Ethel’s home, Dowlatshahi and his camera were able to gain access to that neighborhood.

Nonetheless, Dowlatshahi wasn’t surprised when people resisted his presence—no one likes being filmed by strangers. In fact, Dowlatshahi readily admits that there are good reasons to avoid being on camera: “Non-fiction films thrive on making people look stupid. They thrive on embarrassment. I have to assure people that I’m not trying to do that. I want the opposite. Having someone to make a connection helps.”

Despite being associated with Ethel, Dowlatshahi met resistance from drug dealers who operated in the area. “There are people who engage in drug activity in the neighborhood, and they obviously do not like cameras being around. But they just need to know and be assured by someone they trust that I’m not there to film anyone who doesn’t want to be filmed.” Contacts reached out to the dealers and made it clear that Dowlatshahi was not interested in getting anyone in trouble. “In any situation you’re liable to get messed with unless you are with someone from the neighborhood. Obviously I stick out because I’m not black and I have a camera.”

But Dowlatshahi couldn’t film just one block. While driving around one day, he noticed a restaurant called Pete’s Italian Beef. “I used to go to a different Pete’s in high school, and when I saw this one, I had to see if I could order the same chopsteak sandwich. But I got talking with Tammy who works behind the counter, and eventually I talked my way behind the bulletproof glass.”

Since then, Tammy has opened many doors for Dowlatshahi. One afternoon, she took him to a hair appointment at Studio 59—a new scene Dowlatshahi could film. In one shot uploaded to his website, the frame is still on a woman’s head as Veronica, a stylist, goes to work. The footage is sped up, and a head of hair is transformed into an arrangement of beautiful black and blonde spikes.

At Studio 59, Dowlatshahi also met Jerk Man. According to Dowlatshahi, “When he saw me in the salon with the camera, he said, ‘Oh man, you gotta come out with me, I’ll show you the South Side.’ And he did—he drives around all the neighborhoods everywhere, selling his jerk chicken and curry goat. Jerk Man is really proud of showing off all the areas he knows.”

Dowlatshahi is not entirely sure what all of this is going to add up to. He has other footage. During the summer, he took shots of Washington Park when it “looked like a scene from ‘The Fast and the Furious.’” Vintage cars with modern engines were lined up, while owners mingled in the park. A few weeks ago, Dowlatshahi filmed a man dressed in a Statue of Liberty outfit describing the gang boundaries around 79th and Halsted. All of this together won’t tell a story with a beginning and ending—but that’s not the point. The South Side doesn’t have an ending.

What does matter is that Dowlatshahi gets good footage: “Good footage is telling footage. Good footage is people being real. Good footage is somebody being genuine, or stuff that is intimate, or stuff that is undeniable.”

His footage is beautiful and he sees no conflict between finding true stories and portraying them in a way that looks good. Dowlatshahi also feels that it’s not hard for his footage to look good. In his opinion, “The South Side landscape is rustic, I love the empty lots, not when they’re littered with trash, but there’s lots of big trees and its pretty in the summer and fall.” A scene from the Fourth of July demonstrates the beauty Dowlatshahi is able to capture. The shot begins level with damp, green grass. The camera slowly glides to the right as fireworks are lit, their yellow and orange sparks illuminating shadows. The greens flash from light to dark.

But not everything he has filmed will make it past the final cut. In fact, Dowlatshahi feels that he has only one complete scene at this point. It was filmed at a party in an empty building Dowlatshahi attended with a friend of Tammy’s nephew. “People weren’t there to drink, they were there to dance, and it was great,” says Dowlatshahi. As he was filming, however, an argument broke out between security and some people trying to gain entrance. In an attempt to curb potential gang activity, the party prohibited guests from wearing white shirts or hats. However, some people made it in despite violating the dress code. When some other kids were refused entry, an argument broke out and a gun was flashed.

“Shit happens and it’s over silly disputes like this, but then the guy in charge came up and was like, ‘It’s cool, but none of this gang shit.’ The kids were like, ‘fuck that.’ It’s funny because no one is there to get into a fight, they’re there to dance and talk to girls. The rule that they were getting upset about was in place to prevent violence and fights.”

During the party, Dowlatshahi had a mic on the security guard and got footage of the whole dispute. However, completeness isn’t the only thing he is looking for: “There are all these different things about life on the South Side that are unique to life on the South Side. That party was an example of one of those things. Also, it was an example of a situation that could have escalated to the level of violence you read about in the paper. But that didn’t happen, and I got coverage of what the issues were and how they developed and ended. And, the lens cap wasn’t on my camera, so there it is.” In the end, the party was broken up by the police, but only because it was disturbing a retirement home nearby.

Other scenes are more powerful because they are incomplete. During a snowstorm in January, Dowlatshahi captured a homeless man pushing a train of three grocery carts into the wind. When he approached the man, he was asked for five dollars in exchange. After taking the money, the homeless man offered to pose, but Dowlatshahi said no. Instead, he set up his small dolly so the camera could glide forward with the man’s march through the snow. The only footage he has is of the man walking, with no answers to where or why.

Piecing these scenes into a film will be a challenge. “Editing is problem solving—you only have this footage and you need to make the best of it. You need to make a story out of it.”

In the end, Dowlatshahi hasn’t yet decided what he’s going to do with the film. “It will be in some theater or festival. But, like anybody else, you just want to make a movie and have as many people see it as possible.” In this case, the film’s value really does rely on how many people see it. Our city of neighborhoods is also a city of divisions—Dowlatshahi’s film could break down barriers.

“Most people don’t go to the South Side, and South Siders know that. People focus on the gang violence and poverty—and that’s definitely one part, but there’s so much more than that.”

A small man swimming in a large New York Giants jersey, Lee walked the audience through his life story, from his early education at Morehouse College to his experience finding emergency funding for “Malcolm X” to his current faculty position at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. The gathered crowd was so large that CSU relocated the event from the school’s library to their gymnasium.

“Let’s talk about education,” Lee declared at one point, and education was the underlying current. Famously outspoken about race relations, Lee bemoaned modern attitudes towards black identity and culturally sanctioned ignorance. He was especially concerned that “black kids equate being black with being ignorant.”

Lee recounted his own apathetic approach towards his education before his first foray into cinema. He discovered filming the summer after his second year of college, which he spent with a Super Eight camera in his Brooklyn neighborhood, documenting civilian responses to the Son of Sam killings.

Always controversial, Lee walked the line between honest commentary and deliberate incediarism. At one point, he recounted being told by his mother that he better “be ten times better than your white classmate” if he wanted to succeed. Later on, he offered a more pointed memory of his mother saying, “I know your Jewish classmate has an A.”

However, Lee’s main points were not political in nature. He credited his mother and grandmother with his success, and praised them effusively for exposing him early on to museums, films, and concerts. He encouraged students in the audience to find their creative passion, and begged parents not to “just rely on the schools” to do everything. Nonetheless, he acknowledged that not everyone could be as lucky as he had been. Lee’s grandmother lived to be 100 years old. She never spent a single Social Security check on herself, but instead used that money to send Lee to college.

This exchange was among the milder critiques to emerge from the free, communal viewing of “Three Films about the Middle East,” sponsored by the Southside Hub of Production last Saturday. The attendees had trudged through the bleak, dank November evening to pile into a combination ornate sitting room and modern art gallery.

The full house for the screening was, for the most part, a middle-aged, straight-laced crew. Waiting for the films to begin, one couple chatted seriously about the Republican presidential race while another gentleman, immaculately dressed, perpetually stroked his goatee while perusing the Wall Street Journal.

Calling everyone together, the organization’s film director reminded the audience that the event was more topical than they had planned. The news of the day was the renewed brutality in Tahrir Square, where an army that had helped end one dictator’s crimes had begun to do some beating of its own.

It was, therefore, more than slightly surreal to travel with documentary-maker Pamela Nice back to 2003 when the news roiling Egypt was the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The short documentaries are the fruit of Nice’ s several sojourns to the Middle East.

They record the reactions of Egyptians to an American invasion and the aspirations of several Moroccan teenagers. Then, in a cringe-inducing coda, Nice turns the camera back on the United States.

The films have their faults. Nice gives some nice shots of inchoate Cairo avenues, but often confines her interviews to Egyptian academics and journalists with flawless and erudite English. Her second film is an improvement and altogether rougher on the heartstrings. In a stunning contrast, she recounts the desperation of an unemployed youth detained for illegally immigrating to Spain and an uplifting account of optimistic students craving PhDs from the West.

The footage she produces—young people talking about Islam as a religion of peace—is shown in opposition to the words of a suit we see later in a Minnesotan coffee shop, who calls the entire region “backward and inhumane.”

Americans, in these films, are the ones that consistently come off as backward.

As java-seeking customers promptly surrender when asked to identify basic Middle Eastern countries on a map, you flinch. When an Egyptian man recounts the number of times he’s been asked by Americans if he lives in a pyramid, you want to weep.

At the evening’s close, a petition was passed around protesting the $1.3 billion in munitions we’re still providing to the military government in Egypt. Afterwards, Beshara treated viewers to an original ode he made to the crisis, built around the refrain, “The Situation is Fucked Up!” Confronted with this profane techno ditty, the goateed gentleman stared pointedly into the floorboards. It was clear, however, that no one disagreed.

Courtesy of South Side Projections

It’s a typically warm July evening and the chairs at the South Side Community Arts Center are filled with strange bedfellows. Sixty-year-old former gang members.  Twenty-something film geeks from the North Side. A state senator. Given a casual glance, this is the kind of scene that improv games and creative writing prompts are made of. For organizer Michael W. Phillips Jr., though, this ragtag attendance is validation for his latest endeavor, a roving film series called South Side Projections.

“This is what I want to do,” he says excitedly. “Bring these really interesting groups together in a situation where they might never [have] come together before.” Phillips has years of experience working in the nonprofit world, but his quirky graphic tee and worn jeans place him firmly in a younger demographic. Phillips is thoughtful and amiable—two traits that easily explain his ability to drop the names of dozens of connections in the Chicago arts and nonprofit scenes.

Before starting South Side Projections, Phillips spent six years working at the Bank of America Cinema on the North Side. When the theater unwound its final reel in December of last year, he decided to turn his gaze towards his home neighborhood of Hyde Park. Working with the Hyde Park Alliance for Jazz and Culture, Phillips projected jazz films from neighborhood spaces. He remembers, “It was really fun to sit in a storefront with this clattering projector and show 70-year-old movies. I decided I wanted to expand that, so without any idea what the hell I was doing, I started a nonprofit.” The initial events engaged attendees and reimaging of an ordinary space impassioned Phillips into starting South Side Projections, spurring him to commit the next six months of his life into showing great films in unexpected places.

South Side Projections has all of the trappings of a typical movie theater—except, of course, the theater itself. This isn’t an accident—it is how the organization was designed to work. In its day-to-day operations, South Side Projections is a one-man show. While the organization has a small board of directors, Phillips does most of the work: booking speakers, managing press, setting up the screen and projector. The series banks on the existence of other enthusiastic but tight-budgeted non-profit organizations willing to give its screenings a home. So far, South Side Projections hasn’t been lacking for willing hosts. Phillips describes the process with elegant simplicity: “I find an interesting film that I want to show, and then I find an organization with space.”

Previous collaborations have included screening a film about the Chicago Vice Lords street gang at the aforementioned South Side Community Arts Center and showing a series of documentary shorts about the civil rights movement on the site of the historic Pullman railcar factory. Phillips argues that while these venues occasionally pose technological challenges, the viewing experience is brought to life by the meaningful spaces and company. Recalling a friend’s reaction to an event, Phillip says, “Being there with people who lived through it was so much more effective than just watching something on your TV.”

Others seem to agree, as the turnout has steadily increased. Each of the organization’s events has managed to do what plenty of other community groups struggle to achieve: bring together an audience that is representative of the diverse heritage of the South Side.

The heterogeneous crowd that attends South Side Projections screenings is no doubt due—at least in part—to Phillips’ keen eye for selecting films. While a film buff at heart, Phillips’ taste in movies has more in common with that of “Transformers” director Michael Bay than any be-tweeded professor. “I’m not going to show Ken Burns-style documentaries with people sitting in front of, like, bookcases. Slow pans across photographs—I hate that so much,” he explains with passion. “If your title has a colon in it, rethink it. I’m not interested in watching someone’s dissertation.”

Admission to all of South Side Projections’ events is currently give-what-you-want, and while the organization has low operating costs, money can still be an issue. Currently, Phillips is using proceeds from a city arts grant to submit South Side Projections for federal 501(c)(3) non-profit status. This recognition, he hopes, will allow the organization to apply for grants and to accept corporate sponsorships. “But I don’t want like ‘Nike presents,’” he clarifies.

Phillips’ ultimate vision for South Side Projections isn’t too far from what he already has. “I wouldn’t build a theater,” he says. After a pause he adds, “I don’t think I’d expand beyond what I’m already doing. More of a budget would mean that I could do this more often. That I could pay people to help me do it. And maybe pay myself.”

Though a personal paycheck isn’t off the table, it really does appear that Phillips is sincere in his simple goal to bring good film events to the South Side. “I’ve got a movie and I’ve got people to come and speak and I’ll handle press and I’ll bring my own projector and I’ll bring my own screen, and all you have to do is unlock the door,” he says, mimicking the pitch he provides to the non-profits with which South Side Projections collaborates.

The blonde woman had grown up in an all-white neighborhood near Marquette Park, and attempted to explain that the film everyone had just watched—filmmaker Tom Palazzolo’s footage of local Nazi party members preparing to combat a civil rights march on the park in 1976—did not give a full picture of the terrifying violence blacks faced if they dared to enter the neighborhood. Many in the audience, however, knew exactly how bad it was—they lived through it. And the documentaries were no talking-head montages; the powerful cinema verité-style footage brought viewers brutally close to the events and people that otherwise would fade into the community’s fuzzy collective memory or be loosely approximated by history books.

Etta James’ “At Last” played as projectionists from the Chicago Film Archives set up, and an American flag hung on the wall. Michael Phillips, director of South Side Projections (no relation to the Tribune critic), prefaced the first film—footage of a 1966 Cicero March led by Robert Lucas, who was in attendance—with a warning: “You feel like you’re going to get hit by a rock when you’re watching it.” The cameraman filmed from within the mob of black men and women protesting restrictive covenants. The camera jerked sideways as angry neighborhood residents jostled the filmmaker, then slowly receded from a police officer shaking a club at the lens.

The second film’s portrayal of the party members delivered a shock, not with violence, but with the banality of their hateful campaigning. With an intensity that bordered on the absurd, leader Frank Collin stood on a soapbox, swastika-emblazoned flag waving in the background, announcing a party member’s bid for Congress and proclaiming, “this territory will remain white and not fall to the black invasion.” Phillips put it best when he said, “just seeing them go about their business is more terrifying than almost anything,” even while Collin’s followers were making Monty Python jokes and accepting donations in a glass jar.

The last film—a chat from 2000 between Lucas and Bronzeville Historical Society president Sherry Williams, who was also in attendance—wasn’t as immediately striking, but it was the beginning of a conversation about the movement’s legacy. Eleven years later, the conversation continued, on the screen and in the seats.

This was Huyghe’s second appearance at the UofC. In 2000, the Renaissance Society exhibited one of Huyghe’s first major installations in the United States. Since then, he has emerged as one of the hottest new figures on the conceptual art scene, with works appearing at the Venice Biennale and in the Tate Modern Gallery. And with a spot in the upcoming 2012 Documenta festival in Germany, Huyghe certainly has the accolades to be anything but reasonable.

Yet Huyghe happily adjusted the evening’s schedule to present photo stills of a few of his earlier works, hoping to translate the mood of his forbidden film into an ad hoc slideshow. With passion and enthusiasm, he beckoned the audience into his wildly transposable spaces of reality and fantasy. “There is a protocol of fiction embedded in any condition,” he explained, “and I wish to intensify the coefficient of that fiction, not so much to live in it, but to catch a moment, reinvent it, and create a crystal.”

But each of Huyghe’s crystals is part of a larger lattice system: each piece is interrelated with another, and art breeds more art. “L’expédition scintillante/A musical” is a three-act journey climbing the floors of a museum—passing by a tugboat made of ice (melting over time) to a display of colorful curls of smoke to a black ice-skating rink on the final level. This wild quest was the genesis of a frozen tundra-themed series of works, inspiring “A Journey That Wasn’t,” which involved reconstructing an Antarctic island in the middle of New York’s Central Park. Not content to simply build a model of the icy isle, Huyghe gathered geographic data from the actual landmass and translated them into musical notes, which were played by an orchestra on site.

While he couldn’t play the actual film, to the audience’s delight, Huyghe closed the show with a screening of a ten-minute “making-of” documentary of “The Host and the Cloud.” The video clip showed scenes in a Parisian museum unfolding uncontrolled: outrageous theatrics, pumpkin carvings, and a model solo on her runway.

“I simply put the conditions for narrative, an hypothèse, so that the narrative can happen,” he said, commenting on his role as the orchestrating artist. “I aim to produce a supplement of reality. I know that sounds a little bit pretentious, but well…” Here he cut off, embracing the laughter of the crowd before him.