Usually our coverage of the Chicago Underground Film Festival ends with a roundup of notable short works playing on various bills—but this year, the last shall be first. Some of the most inventive and exciting stuff at CUFF comes in small packages, so why not give them the attention they deserve? In a way, shorts are even more underground than features because they cost so much less to produce. The only way to be more underground would be not to make a film at all.
Back in 1999, Mark Borchardt became an unlikely hero to no-budget filmmakers everywhere when American Movie documented his quest to shoot a backwoods horror flick called Coven. Borchardt returns with The Dundee Project (Sat 6/3, 7 PM), reporting on the “UFO Daze” event in Dundee, Wisconsin. Now he’s the one poking fun at lovable rubes, introducing UFO Bob, a well-oiled local and a fixture at the event, as “not just a stargazer but a star seeker, guiding the innocent to a greater transcendence.” According to Bob, alien visitors have educated themselves about our culture by monitoring broadcasts of Packers games.
Kuro A Japanese woman in Paris, who nurses her paraplegic white boyfriend by day and works in a karaoke bar by night, is the unreliable narrator of this unnerving drama. Directors Tujiko Noriko and Joji Koyama tell their story largely through the woman’s voice-over, whose frequent incongruity with the action onscreen creates an atmosphere of dreamlike uncertainty and suggests a kaleidoscopic state of mind: the woman (played by Noriko) speaks in first and third person, in Japanese and French, as she tells stories from her past, particularly her happier years with the man when he was able-bodied. Conversely, his interior life is left blank; he appears to be mute, and neither his physical nor his seeming mental paralysis is ever explained. The result is a creepy experiment in nonlinear storytelling that successfully blurs reality, memory, and fantasy. In Japanese and French with subtitles. —Leah Pickett 84 min. Thu 6/1, 9 PM.
Wed 5/31-Sun 6/4 Logan 2646 N. Milwaukee 773-252-0628cuff.org $10 unless otherwise noted below, $90 for a festival pass
