The 19th Chicago Underground Film Festival runs Thursday, May 31, through Thursday, June 7, at Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800. Tickets are $11, $7 for students, and $6 for Film Center members. Following are selected programs; for a full schedule see cuff.org.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The Fourth Dimension Commissioned by Grolsch Beer, this anthology film collects three shorts about the title concept, which most of the artists interpret simply as “time.” Harmony Korine (Trash Humpers) directed “The Lotus Community Workshop,” whose star attraction is Val Kilmer delivering a loopy motivational speech to a crowd of middle-American losers in a bowling alley. Aleksei Fedorchenko (Silent Souls) directed “Chronoeye,” about an esteemed Russian mathematician who’s trying to invent a time machine, and the free-spirited woman in the apartment overhead who keeps distracting him with her dance routine. The sole knockout, however, comes from the filmmaker with the shortest track record: Jan Kwiecinski, a native of Warsaw and a recent graduate of the London Film School. His apocalyptic drama “Fawns” follows four young pals as they romp around an evacuated town, a civil defense siren rising and falling in the distance and news broadcasts warning of a cataclysmic flood. Nothing drives home the idea of time more powerfully than watching it run out. In English and subtitled Russian and Polish. —J.R. Jones 105 min. Thu 5/31, 8 PM
Heavy Girls This 2011 German comedy proves that quirkiness can take a movie only so far. Sven, a portly, middle-aged banker, lives with and cares for his mother, who suffers from dementia, but during the day he entrusts her to Daniel, a tubby orderly. One afternoon the mother manages to wander off, and as Sven and Daniel search for her, they give in to their repressed mutual attraction. Thanks to their body types, their awkward love affair sometimes feels like a comedy sketch from the cable show Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! The movie is perfectly enjoyable—the characters are sympathetic and well drawn, the story funny, the cinematography tastefully naturalistic—but there’s not enough going on beneath the surface to sustain interest. Axel Ranisch directed. —Drew Hunt 77 min. Ranisch attends the screening. Fri 6/1, 8 PM
Two Years at Sea The first feature-length effort by noted experimental filmmaker Ben Rivers demonstrates such mastery of the image that it’s worth seeing for the textures alone. Shooting on black-and-white celluloid, he creates a hazy, granulated look that suggests an old daguerrotype come to life, which feels appropriate considering his subject is a human anachronism. Former sailor Jake Williams (whom Rivers first documented in the 2006 short This Is My Land) lives a solitary life in the Scottish wilderness, scavenging for food and constructing items from industrial refuse. This is filled with gorgeous natural imagery, but it isn’t an environmentalist statement or even a straight documentary: in one of the more audacious sequences, Williams gazes in wonder as his trailer floats to the top of a tree. —Ben Sachs 90 min. Mon 6/4, 6 PM
