By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

CHICAGO CRITICS FILM FESTIVAL Announces Audience Award Winners, Exponential Festival Growth

Posted Monday, May 14th, 2018 - Comments Off on CHICAGO CRITICS FILM FESTIVAL Announces Audience Award Winners, Exponential Festival Growth
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(Chicago, IL) — The Chicago Film Critics Association (CFCA), the Chicago-area print, online and broadcast critics group that celebrates the art of film and film criticism, today announces the Audience Award winners following the 6th Chicago Critics Film Festival. Audiences selected Closing Night feature presentation Eighth Grade as winner of the Audience Award for narrative features; the film screened to a sold-out crowd as the festival wrapped up on May 10 at Chicago’s historic Music Box Theater.

Additionally, Three Identical Strangers, the incredible true story of three triplets separated at birth and reunited years later, received the Audience Award for documentary, while two short films tied for Audience Award honors: Runner, written and directed by Chicago-based filmmaker Clare Cooney, and We Forgot to Break Up.

The sixth edition of the festival also boasted the largest crowds to date, with a nearly 15% increase in ticket sales over 2017’s affair, the largest growth year-over-year for the highly-anticipated annual event. Special guests this year included Gugu Mbatha-Raw (A Wrinkle in Time) and Jordan Horowitz (La La Land) with Opening Night selection Fast Color; writer/director Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull) with First Reformed; Bo Burnham (The Big Sick) with his feature film debut, Eighth Grade; and many more. Images from the 2018 Chicago Critics Film Festival can be found here.

“We’re beyond thrilled with the reception of this year’s festival,” said producers and programmers Erik Childress and Brian Tallerico. “Not only was it our strongest slate of films, as filmmakers and studios continue to recognize the audiences they can connect to through us, but the lines wrapped around the block throughout the week prove that Chicago film lovers are eager and hungry for the quality of films we present.”

As the week-long event came to a close, it was also announced that the Chicago Critics Film Festival would participate in the City of Chicago’s outdoor film series at Millennium Park, selecting Mad Max: Fury Road to screen Tuesday, June 12 at Pritzker Pavilion. The summer series features selections from several different film festivals around the city.

Runner-up for Best Film Festival in the Chicago Reader’s 2017 “Best of Chicago” poll, the CCFF annually features a selection of acclaimed films chosen by members of the organization, a combination of recent festival favorites and as-yet-undistributed works from a variety of filmmakers, from established Oscar winners to talented newcomers. It is the only current example of a major film critics group that hosts its own festival. The seventh edition of the festival will return in May of 2019.

About the Chicago Film Critics Association

The Chicago Film Critics Association supports and celebrates quality filmmaking that has something to say about our world, our lives, and our society. In the past, while the CFCA’s priority was to support and fight for the continued role of film critics in the media, the CFCA’s public interaction was limited to the announcement of its annual film awards. In recent years, the CFCA has expanded its presence on the Chicago arts scene, promoting critical thinking about cinema to a wider base through several initiatives, including the re-launch of a late-winter film awards ceremony; CFCA-hosted film screenings throughout Chicagoland; and a Young People’s Film Criticism Workshop at Facets Multimedia. The annual Chicago Critics Film Festival further builds on the organization’s goal to be an active part of the Chicago film landscape.

 

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon