The 14th European Union Film Festival continues Friday, March 18, through Thursday, March 31, at Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800. Tickets are $10, $7 for students, and $5 for Film Center members. Following are selected films screening through Thursday, March 24; for a full schedule see siskelfilmcenter.com.
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R The Arbor British playwright Andrea Dunbar was only 18 when The Arbor, her blunt account of life in a squalid council estate, premiered at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 1980; by age 29 she was dead of a cerebral hemorrhage, leaving behind three completed works and three children by three different men. This daring film by Clio Barnard revisits Dunbar’s sad life and the even sadder life of her eldest daughter, Lorraine, dissolving the line between the stage and the real world just as the playwright tried to do. Domestic interior scenes from the eponymous play are staged outdoors at the Buttershaw estate where Dunbar lived, with residents looking on from the sidelines; and in the movie’s most audacious gambit, actors lip-sync audio interviews recorded with the actual people in Dunbar’s life. The resulting film is harshly, almost unbearably tragic, but it’s also a startling paradox, impressively layered even as it strips the situations down to their naked truth. 94 min.—J.R. Jones Reader critic J.R. Jones will introduce the Thu 3/24 screening, and a reception will follow. Sun 3/20, 7 PM, and Thu 3/24, 6 PM.
Nenette The subject of this 2010 documentary is a 40-year-old orangutan that has lived most of its life in the Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes in Paris. Widowed three times and separated from all but one of her children, Nénette spends her old age, sadly, as many humans do: staring idly at life through a glass screen. Nicolas Philibert (To Be and to Have) emphasizes the ape’s detachment by shooting the entire movie from outside the cage and presenting its caretakers only as offscreen voices. These formal tactics effectively illustrate the division between human and animal consciousness; they also become a little monotonous after a while. In French with subtitles. 67 min. —Ben Sachs Also on the program: Night Falls on the Ménagerie (2010, 11 min.), Philibert’s charming video portrait of the same Parisian zoo at dusk. Sun 3/20, 3 PM, and Wed 3/23, 6:15 PM.
