The festival ran from 1982 to 1996, right?
- Truck Turner
I was studying music back then, and it was through that I got the cinch of doing things for yourself, creating something for yourself. But what really got Blacklight going was this festival [held] at South Shore High School in 1981. It wasn’t run very well, it was a little disappointing, but it showed a lot of the films that had come through the Black Filmmakers Collective, which was run by Warrington Hudlin, whom I’d met a couple of times after I came back to the country in 1979.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
So, I had a lot of good influences—like Omar Kaihatsu, who ran the Japanese film screenings at Francis W. Parker Auditorium for years. I remember talking to him about it. He said, “You don’t want to get in this business. This is awful!” He was right! [laughs] But then, I wouldn’t have become an expert in Japanese film if [it] hadn’t been for what Omar Kaihatsu had done. You know, we once had a Japanese film festival in Chicago. It was at the World Playhouse on Michigan Avenue, before it became the Fine Arts Theater. Back then, the theater used to run a lot of soft porn. But thanks to Omar, one summer they ran a whole month of Japanese films, from ten o’clock in the morning until ten at night! That was my baptism into cinema, because I went every day. Sometimes I would go punch into work at Sears, split, go to the movies, and come back, because they were showing something that wasn’t coming back. I got in trouble, of course. Thankfully I got on probation instead of getting fired.
I started going to festivals. I would try to go to Toronto and a few others, though I couldn’t always afford to travel. Eventually we got an office. We got grants from the Illinois Arts Council and the Chicago City Arts Council, when it was under Fred Fine. We did really well during the reign of Harold Washington.
- Top of the Heap
