- The Mystery of Life, Cone’s latest movie, screens three times this week.
It’s been a busy year for Chicago-based actor and filmmaker Stephen Cone. In June his most recent feature Black Box received a weeklong run at the Gene Siskel Film Center, his featurette This Afternoon played at this Chicago International Film Festival earlier this month, and his latest work, The Mystery of Life, plays at Chicago Filmmakers tomorrow at 8 PM, Sunday at 6 PM, and on Wednesday at 6:30 PM at Columbia College’s Hokin Hall. While completing these movies, Cone also increased his workload as an acting teacher, instructing courses at Second City, Chicago Acting Studio, Chicago Filmmakers, and Northwestern University. Not surprisingly Mystery focuses squarely on the acting process. It’s a highly personal work as well as Cone’s most experimental piece to date. In it he plays a fictionalized version of himself, an independent filmmaker casting his next movie (which is also called “The Mystery of Life”). The drama grows out of the emotional transactions that occur during the casting sessions, blurring the line between performance and real life. The other day I caught up with Cone for a few minutes before his course at Northwestern started, and we discussed how his two most recent projects came to be.
That’s another case of the project lining up with that style. I don’t want to force a story into a particular style, but these simple projects came about from an interest in recording actors, so the style fit.
- This Afternoon
This Afternoon turned up at the Chicago International.
