Inspired by international film critic Ela Bittencourt’s Neither/Nor Series at the 2015 True/False Film Festival, five different Chicago arts organizations collaborate to present this series of rare Polish political documentaries with an experimental slant. Presented at three venues across the city and with Bittencourt in attendance, TO THICKEN, NOT DISTORT will include three programs of work.
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Monday, January 18th, 2016 at 7:00 pm
Constellation Chicago (3111 N. Western), $10
Presented by Run of Life
Ela Bittencourt in attendance
WANDA GOŚCIMSKA. … A WEAVER (dir. Wojciech Wiszniewski, 1975, 21 min.)
HEAR MY CRY (dir. Maciej Drygas, 1994, 57 min.)
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Tuesday, January 19th, 2016 at 7:00 pm
Society for Arts (1112 N. Milwaukee), $10
Presented by Beguiled Cinema
Ela Bittencourt in attendance
THE CASE OF PEKOSIŃSKI, (dir. Grzegorz Królikiewicz, 19, 21 min.)
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Wednesday, January 20th, 2016 at 7:00 pm
The NIGHTINGALE (1084 N. Milwaukee), $10
Presented by Run of Life
HOW TO LIVE (dir. Marcel Łoziński, 1977, 83 min)
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Polish director, Marcel Łoziński, claims “I’m a documentary filmmaker … because I like to ‘thicken’ reality but never to distort it.” This encapsulates the chimeric quality of the movies in this series, forged with aesthetics of absurdism and a prescient sense of what is now the genre we call non-fiction. These works reflect the political climate of Communist Poland and its blacklash. The subjects of these docs are a man willing to lose everything in protest, a former chess champion oppressed by a fascist government, and a worker memorialized in outsized proportion. Portraits of a conflicted era, these movies don’t try to escape their circumstances but rather meld the chaos into humorous and poignant documents of a bygone political age.
Ela Bittencourt is a writer, critic, and film programmer. She has written for a wide range of publications including Artforum, Cineaste, Frieze Magazine, Film Quarterly, Guernica, Los Angeles Review of Books, Senses of Cinema, and Reverse Shot, among others. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University, where she taught essay writing.
TO THICKEN, NOT DISTORT is presented by Constellation Chicago, Run of Life, The Nightingale, and Beguiled Cinema, Society for Arts, and organized by Christy LeMaster and Kathleen Sachs.