Heaven knows what possessed the Chicago International Film Festival to adopt “Film capital of the world” as its slogan this year, but considering some of the movies that played in New York and Los Angeles recently and never made it here, it’s more than a stretch. Among the remarkable films they could see and we couldn’t were the subtitled, not the dubbed, version of Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), Abbas Kiarostami’s Five (2003), Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Cafe Lumiere (2003), and several 2005 films, including Tickets (with 40-minute episodes by Kiarostami, Ken Loach, and Ermanno Olmi), Hou’s Three Times, Alexander Sokurov’s The Sun, and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s L’enfant. Of course even if you lived in New York or LA you might not have heard about them, because the industry, which assumes no one’s interested in such films, kept their profiles so low.
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All the same, Toronto is by common consensus the site of the most important film festival in North America, having bypassed Sundance as a marketing tool of the studios, though still trailing far behind Cannes in terms of prestige. With a bit of goodwill, Chicago’s festival might qualify our city as the “film capital of the midwest.” The studios’ lack of interest in this event may be a blessing, because we’re not being bullied by celebrity journalism and advertising for a few favored films and can make our own choices.
