In basketball, the expression goes “We left it all on the floor,” meaning we gave all we had. That describes the dozen producers who presented at the Sept. 16 Oak Park International Film Festival at Oak Park Public Library’s free, non-juried, open-to-the-public event. All 12 gave all they had in form, content, but most importantly working together in a seamless collective for the festival’s greater good.
The festival’s theme was “Resist.” The subject allowed for intense cinematic investigation of the ways individuals, collectives, and institutions foment change and cross borders. From spoken word to scientific intervention, we considered through film the reasoning and actions that critique and disrupt systems of hierarchy and oppression. Through visual inquiry, we sought to provoke debate, confront convention and promote actions of social justice and civic engagement.
Prof. Bayo Ojikutu of DePaul University introduced his student, Destini Riley, a film freshman, whose “I Destini” cartoon first appeared on the New York Times “op-doc,” used tens of thousands of animation frames to illustrate how the then-13-year-old girl felt about how her brother was unjustly convicted of killing a cop in the beginning of the Black Lives Matter Movement.
“My film was used at his trial to overturn his conviction, yet he still remains in prison,” she said. “My dad cried when he viewed it. My imprisoned brother wondered why I turned him into a giraffe instead of a lion.”
DePaul film professors Shayna Connelly and Wendy Roderweiss assisted Riley in setting up her film, which ran just before their experimental “Gardening at Night,” which describes the period between knowing death is near and death’s arrival. This art film “presents a new narrative for female filmmakers who resist Hollywood’s systemic discrimination against women directors,” she added.
Two of Oak Park’s recently-retired elected officials were there — former village clerks Sandra Sokol and Theresa Powell. Oak Park actress and journalist Alice Clark Brown, who has attended all of the festivals, said, “As an enlightened witness I applaud the way the festival highlights local filmmakers and bridges the gap across Austin Boulevard,” which she defined as “a metaphor between us and them.”
Her husband, a former newspaper editor who requested anonymity, agreed. He said this was the best of all 13 festivals because of how well everyone worked together and how each director honestly allowed the subjects to “speak in their own voices instead of speaking for them, which is the difference between appreciation and appropriation.” He enjoyed “Why We March,” directed by Laurie Little, Theresa (Tessa Lenore) Campagna and Jess Mattison about Oak Park and other women who protested the inauguration, and “Little Wound’s Warriors,” directed by Seth McClellan about Sioux suicides.
Nancy Mikelsons, a retired activist-educator who has visited Cuba more than 100 times, rolling in a wheelchair, she said she was “thrilled” with a trio of Cuba-related documentaries directed by this reporter: “Revisiting Afro Cuba,” “Chi-town Blues Musicians Jam With Guantanamo Counterparts” and “Iguales” (Equity), which featured a stunning photograph of her best friend, Dr. Hebert Ramiro Perez.
Special thanks go to New Orleans Ashe Cultural Arts Center where music video “Iguales” (Equity) was filmed and the Hothouse Chicago-Guantanamo Blues Exchange, which arranged travel. According to founder Marguerite Horberg, “HotHouse organized the Chicago-Guantanamo Blues Exchange in part to further its work in facilitating cultural connections in the African diaspora and in part to re-contextualize Guantanamo, which has been most notoriously known to U.S. citizens as a detention center and military base.”
On Oct. 13, HotHouse will open the photo exhibit at Uri Eichel Gallery, 2105 S. Halsted, tied to the Chicago-Guantanamo Exchange titled, “Cuba Si! Bloqueo No! Looking at the Revolution.”
