I was on the red carpet as one of many journalists trying to get inside the minds of filmmakers showcasing their work at the Chicago International Film Festival. Amid the jostling for position, journalists were generally working together to make sure we all got what we needed. And that was obviously different from person to person. Almost none of us were asking the same questions. I realized that although we might be asking similar things, we were approaching our queries from different vantage points. We were all establishing our own voice on the red carpet, while each filmmaker was expressing their voice through film. And my discussions with these passionate filmmakers revealed their version of what it takes to find one’s place on the big screen, behind it, and ultimately in their own life.
Opening night showcased Jordan Firstman’s film Club Kid, about a gay club promoter who is about that club life and has it interrupted when his 10-year-old son is dropped off at his door—a son he didn’t know he had. I thought about the film, and three
Ps came to mind: partying, parenting, and problems. And while I had only a quick moment to engage with the filmmaker, it set the stage for my red-carpet discussions.
(Photo Credits: Rob Grabowski)
Reggie Ponder: Jordan, you’ve got partying, parenting, and problems. How do those three come together in Club Kid?
Jordan Firstman: You can’t have a party without the problems. You can’t have parenting without problems. You can have some problems without partying or without parenting. But yeah, you hit the three Ps. I think I wanted to explore what it means to be a parent in the modern age and a new parent. And what it means to party in the modern age, and to party as a queer person in the modern age. And you know, what’s a movie without a couple of problems?
In Club Kid, someone is trying to find his footing as a parent. In Speechless, a stolen wedding speech leaves someone trying to find his footing within his own family. The situations differ, but both raise questions about where we fit in.
Reggie Ponder: Beyond the missing wedding speech, what interested you about someone who does not feel comfortable in that family space?
Ben Bushell: I think the premise of the film was that there was kind of no speech at all because it was taken away, but that commentary of it being a really awkward thing. Everyone wants to say something, but no one actually needs to say anything at all. But it’s how you feel within those spaces as maybe someone who doesn’t naturally fit in those spaces or comfortably fit in those spaces. So, it’s got a good commentary on that in terms of how that speech was stolen and that feeling of discomfort and awkwardness.
Ryan Walker-Edwards: And it’s also about seeing yourself as well. So in terms of the films that we make, we make films for queer audiences, and it’s also good to show a Black perspective from the UK as well.
And sometimes it’s not about finding the strength to care for a child or the words to say in a crowded room. It’s about admitting you need help. For George Ellzey Jr., that struggle was at the center of his film Closed Mouths.
Reggie Ponder: After the success of your short film Cottage Grove, what were you carrying into this film, Closed Mouths?
George Ellzey Jr.: I was so burnt out from the tour with Cottage Grove that I was depleted emotionally, mentally, and physically. And so, similar to Closed Mouths, by not taking care of myself, I got into a depressed state. And it was through family, friends, my community rallying around me to say, “Hey, you can communicate, you can get support. You just have to say it. Say it anyway, no matter how big or small.” So that’s what I put into Closed Mouths.
Reggie Ponder: How did you get past knowing you had something to say but wondering whether anybody wanted to hear it?
George Ellzey Jr.: I think for me, I had to realize I was enough for myself. And once I made that realization, things shifted afterwards.
Ellzey was questioning the expectations we put on ourselves. PJ Fishwick takes that a step further in Structure, exploring how we are programmed using an unlikely main character: a parking ticket validation machine.
Reggie Ponder: What did that machine allow you to explore about the stories we believe about ourselves?
PJ Fishwick: I’m trying to convey that we’re all, each of us, born into situations and kind of programmed with certain scripts that we believe about ourselves, and that we can break out of those and be something more.
Fishwick explores personal potential, while Duncan Analco explores personal isolation and the need for connection in his short film Three Days in Tlaquepaque.
Here, a woman in a Chicago winter writes to a lover who doesn’t write back.
Reggie Ponder: The film has just three shots. What were you trying to have the audience experience beyond the story itself?
Duncan Analco: For me, it’s a feeling of intellectualism. I always emphasize that in my filmmaking, just because it’s so unconventional, a little avant-garde. This is not a conventional narrative. It’s a total of just three shots. A second thing I like to emphasize is that my films are very long-paced. The shots linger a very long time, and if an audience member can sit there and let the time move through them and enter the scene and take away after the film and be like, “Wow, I was transported in this film,” and maybe think about things I haven’t thought about and maybe feel things I haven’t felt …if they’re forced to kind of face that in that passage of time, then I’m happy.
What makes one filmmaker happy can be altogether different from what satisfies another. While Duncan wants audiences to sit with an image and perhaps feel something unfamiliar, husband-and-wife team Jen and Guy Bauer would be happy giving them a break from their daily worries. Their film Ana the Cleaner follows a housecleaner who loves murder mysteries and thinks she has uncovered one at her place of employment.
Reggie Ponder: What would make Ana the Cleaner a successful experience for an audience?
Jen Bauer: I would just like them to have a good time. There’s some twists in it and I feel like everyone likes a good twist and a surprise ending, and yeah, just enjoy the ride.
Guy Bauer: The goal of the movie for 86 minutes is for people to just kind of forget about their email and forget about their boss and job, and just honestly enjoy it. There’s no real deep meaning. That wasn’t my goal. But there is meaning in it, but it’s up to the audience to decide what that meaning is.
And while the short film Choke has serious meaning, it too is a ride indeed. Filmmakers Kemi Mayomi, Joelle Velez, and Cee Pham brought plenty of laughter to our discussion of a comedy that mocks our current political climate.
Reggie Ponder: What can we expect as we are taken on this wild and crazy ride?
Cee Pham: Choke is about a character who’s a propagandist who falls trapped and victim to her own propaganda. It’s very girly pop set in a corporate world. It’s cutesy, dark, humorous, and overall fun.
Reggie Ponder: You’re having fun together here on the red carpet. How did you balance having fun with the seriousness of the message and project itself?
Joelle Marie Velez: I think our production meetings were really centered on building each other up. Making a film is so hard to do, and we would start with affirmations and talk about what we needed, and that really centered us. And when things got really hard, we were able to know what each other needed and then give that to each other. So that was really essential.
Kemi Mayomi: As Joelle mentioned, we started off each meeting with our intentions and with affirmations, and at the end of the day, we just remembered we’re all people, we’re all human, we’re trying to make a film, and just having care for each other. We’re all trying to achieve a single goal.
That care for each other brought the conversation back to connection. But what happens when a film keeps making those connections decades later? For Stephen Winter’s Chocolate Babies and Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman, the conversation is still going. These LGBTQ+ films are foundational to American cinema, and both filmmakers were able to convey why they resonate.
Reggie Ponder: Chocolate Babies captures a particular time, but what makes it relevant today?
Stephen Winter: This film was conceived right before protease inhibitors helped people with AIDS live longer lives and made HIV-positive people not have to get AIDS. So the film, throughout all of its joyfulness and silliness, has a bleakness to it because people die in the end, and that’s how things were back then.
I had a, the experience of coming of age and going into the world, and meeting older gentlemen who were HIV positive. They would mentor me, we’d have some laughs, and then six months later I’d go to their funerals. That energy of having to fight through that kind of oppression feels very relevant today, at multiple levels for multiple kinds of people. So I think that’s part of what is making the revival so exciting. Not to mention, it’s really fun.
Dunye sees another connection between her film and the present: the way people speak directly to an audience.
Reggie Ponder: What do you think keeps The Watermelon Woman relevant today?
Cheryl Dunye: The relevant quality of the film for me comes because media has changed. Media now is talking head. People are on their cameras talking to us, saying, “Watch me wear a hat at the fish store. Watch me put food in my mouth.” I do similar things.
I also do different things in my film that are much more compact and fictional or real, but I have a presentation that’s coming at you, talking directly to you, and that’s what people want. They wanna be talked to. They wanna understand. They want somebody who looks like them to talk to them about their experience, about the hardship, and that’s what social media has become. So I feel like The Watermelon Woman has a kind of social media quality to it because it’s me live logged, and that’s what people are gunning for in their own social media right now.
Whatever people are looking for, they will find varied voices speaking to their own lives. Be it escaping the day-to-day, confronting one’s own mortality, or exploring an aspect of one’s humanity, the Chicago International Film Festival has a lot to say through cinema. That age-old question is alive and well: “Does film imitate life or does life imitate film?”
