This July marks the two-year anniversary of Filmfront, a cine club and artists’ studio in Pilsen. Located at 1740 W. 18th (just a block and a half from the 18th Street Pink Line station), the space offers free screenings, reading groups, and art exhibitions. Filmfront will commemorate its second birthday with the release of a 24-page monograph called Film Food Footnotes. The book, according to cofounder and programmer Malia Haines-Stewart, combines production stills, research notes, and excerpts of film dialogue that relate to instances in movies where people discuss food. Over the course of the month Filmfront will host screenings of three films discussed in the monograph: Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet’s Sicilia! (1999), Jia Zhang-ke’s Still Life (2006), and Alexander Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930). As usual for the space, the screenings will be followed by audience discussions.
The audience has grown over the last two years to include not just customers from the local Chinese take-out restaurant, but a number of local artists. Chicago-based filmmaker Michael Wawzenek (who also programmed for the Pilsen-based cine club Little House) has organized screenings at Filmfront. It was publisher Imani Jackson, founder of the new local press Conjugation, who approached the founders about creating a monograph. On July 10, another local artist, Hani Moustafa, will host a one-day workshop about film production for area middle-school students; Medina and Haines-Stewart hope that the workshop will be the first in an ongoing series. “We’d like to get younger people involved in working in the space and hopefully coming to screenings as well,” Haines-Stewart says. “We don’t get a lot of people under 20 at our screenings, but I’d like to see more of them and find out what they’re thinking about films.”
