cinemadaily | Despite “Second City Syndrome,” Chicago Fest Prevails

A scene from Tina Mabry's "Mississippi Damned," which won the Golden Hugo award at the 2009 Chicago International Film Festival.

The awards may have already been handed out, but the 45th Chicago International Film Festival doesn’t officially wrap until tomorrow. Catch up with the coverage coming out of the festival:

“For its trouble, CIFF has always struggled with the second-city syndrome that swept through Daley Plaza last Friday,” notes J.R. Jones, Cliff Doerksen, Andrea Gronvall and Joshua Katzman in their overview of the festival for the Chicago Reader. “Unlike the big festivals in Cannes, Venice, Toronto, and Berlin, ours has never been, and probably never will be, an international draw. Yet in presenting new work to an enthusiastic local audience, the festival gives more than it takes: It solicits from its international visitors not their tourist dollars but their stories, ideas, and hopes for the future. And it enables the city’s varied immigrant population to celebrate their old cultures as well as their new one. That ought to be worth a garland.”

Ray Pride at Movie City Indie runs down the festival’s closing night ceremony where top honors went to Tina Mabry’s “Mississippi Damned” and Andrea Arnold’s “Fish Tank” took the Silver Hugo Special Jury Award.

Roger Ebert blogs about the winners and offers a ton of capsule reviews.

Over at the Auteurs, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky has an interview with Patrice Chéreau whose film “Persecution” screened at the festival, as well as reviews of Eduardo Valente’s “Eye of the Storm” and André Téchiné‘s “The Girl on the Train.” Téchiné‘s films has “an exchange in a travel goods store that Cantinflas would’ve loved, some of the most beautiful dissolves and double-exposures since the end of the silent film and a webcam sequence even better than the one at the end of ‘demonlover’ and possibly the greatest in all cinema.”

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The Chicago Reader has a host of capsule reviews coming out of the festival, including “Persecution,” Sabu’s “Kanikôsen,” and Corneliu Porumboiu’s “Police, Adjective.” Meanwhile, as CIFF winds down, the Chicago International Children’s Film Festival‘s prepares to kick off tomorrow. Judy Sutton Taylor at Time Out Chicago has an interview with the festival’s founder, Nicole Dreiske, who offers a rundown of what the festival is offering this year. The A.V. Club Chicago’s Andy Seifert offers up a couple recommendations on what to catch at the CICFF this year. Login to recommend this article » posted on October 21, 2009 Films to Snag Login to Leave a Comment »