The Beauty of the Donkey La Beauté de l'Âne
Synopsis
Award-winning Swiss Albanian filmmaker Dea Gjinovci (2020’s Wake Up on Mars) returns to the bucolic Kosovo town of her father’s youth—a place he hasn’t seen in 60 years—for this lyrical journey into the past at once wistful and tragic. Together, they recreate his childhood memories, making sets that resemble his former home and with scenes acted out by the local villagers. Through this collective creative project, 1950s Kosovo springs to life in a series of beautifully realized vignettes that prompt Gjinovci’s father to reflect on times of innocence, of violence (when the country persecuted the Albanian population), and of loss, enabling him to finally reckon with the disappearance of his mother decades before.
This evocative mix of memory and reenactment allows father and daughter to uncover shocking truths about their family history and to come to terms with a legacy of oppression. A touching narrative of resilience and catharsis, The Beauty of the Donkey is also a sensitive and bittersweet testament to the power of stories to bring back people and places that history and political strife have tried to erase.
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Media
Film Credits
- Dea Gjinovci, Palmyre Badinier
- Dea Gjinovci
- Lizi Gelber
- Maxime Kathari
- Asllan Gjinovci, Leart Gjinovci
- Gael Kyriakidis
- Maida Lynn
- Astrae Productions
Sponsors
Program Partner
Program Patron
Cynthia Stone Raskin
With support from
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Bouchra
Synopsis
Bouchra, a coyote, is a queer Moroccan filmmaker based in New York City, navigating love and work in a world populated by other animal friends and family, including her hot ex-girlfriend, a cow, her best friend, a lizard, and her mom, Aicha, a coyote who lives back home in Casablanca. While Bouchra is finding her way in Manhattan, she has never resolved her mother’s lack of acceptance of her sexuality. It’s not that Bouchra has never come out; it’s that despite their closeness, her mom simply refuses to talk about it.
Brought to life in 3D animation, filmmaking team Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani, known for their 2020 lockdown art sensation 2 Lizards, have crafted a unique animated docu-fiction hybrid that is profoundly intimate, light-hearted, and touching, with a quirky surrealist edge. So what if they’re cool animals? Bouchra is a universal story of immigrant life, family conflict, and queer identity.
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Media
Film Credits
- 2 Lizards
- Orian Barki, Meriem Bennani, Ayla Mrabet
- Orian Barki, Meriem Bennani
- John Michael Boling
- Meriem Bennani, Yto Barrada, Orian Barki, Ariana Faye Allensworth, Salima Dhaibi
- Flavien Berger
- Orian Barki, Meriem Bennani, Max Brun, Hi Production, Cécile Winckler, Octavia Peissel, Ella Bishop, Pau Suris, Jake Cheetham
- 2 Lizards Production, Hi Production, Fondazione Prada
Sponsors
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A Brief History of Chasing Storms
Synopsis
From The Wizard of Oz to the Twister movies, the tornado has become an iconic American symbol. In A Brief History of Chasing Storms, Chicago filmmaker Curtis Miller takes us on a road-trip through “tornado alley”—an ever-widening region that extends from Texas and Oklahoma across the Great Plains and up into Wisconsin and Minnesota. Along the way, he reflects on the multifaceted myths and histories around the famously destructive weather events, recounted by those who have been impacted as well as by opportunists looking to profit.
From a guide at the Twister Museum to the owner of a company that builds tornado shelters and a team of intrepid storm chasers, tornado-philes of all stripes are featured as the film traverses the U.S., capturing the landscape in carefully staged tableaux. Through an evocative series of vignettes, quirky yet swirling with meaning in a world increasingly reshaped by environmental catastrophe, this thoughtful cinematic essay maps out the ways in which history, inequality, climate, colonization, and capitalism are entwined with these natural disasters.
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Media
Film Credits
- Curtis Miller
- M Sage
- Midwest Exegesis
- https://www.abriefhistory.online/
Sponsors
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Program Patron
Cynthia Stone Raskin
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Cover-Up
Synopsis
Chicago journalist Seymour Hersh has uncovered some of the most momentous political scandals in American history, from exposing the U.S. military’s My Lai massacre in Vietnam to its torturing of Iraqi citizens at Abu Ghraib. After decades spent trying to get Hersh to agree to make a documentary, Oscar winner Laura Poitras (CitizenFour), together with Mark Obenhaus, finally get their moment, sitting with the occasionally combative Hersh to do a deep dive into his history, his investigations, and his sources, telling a story not only about the legendary indefatigable reporter but also about the need to hold those in power accountable for their actions.
No hagiographic portrait, Cover-Up shows Pulitzer Prize winner Hersh as a complex and contentious figure whose reputation has taken a fair share of knocks, even as he’s been one of America’s most important truth-tellers. As President Nixon says of Hersh in an archived audio recording, “The son of a bitch is a son of the bitch, but he’s usually right.” As we observe brief scenes of Hersh still working to expose abuses in Gaza, the film serves as a testament to the vital need for investigative journalism in our precarious modern world.
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Media
Film Credits
- Yoni Golijov, Laura Poitras, Mark Obenhaus, Olivia Streisand
- Amy Foote ACE, Peter Bowman, Laura Poitras
- Mia Cioffi Henry
- Seymour Hersh
- Maya Shenfeld
- Thomas MacWhirr, Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Josh Braun, Nick Shumaker
- Praxis Films, Project Mockingbird
Sponsors
Program Partner
Program Patron
Cynthia Stone Raskin
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The Cowboy
Synopsis
At 11-years-old, Crowley McCuistion has a bright future ahead of him as a cowboy in the plains of Colorado. Training since he was a toddler and encouraged by his strict father Curt, mother Farrah, and supportive older brother Yancie, the young Crowley knows exactly who he wants to be when he grows up. As he says, “Cowboys have to be tough… you have to shake it off and go on with life.” But when an unexpected tragedy hits the family in his teenage years, Crowley learns it’s not so easy to shake things off. Turns out the challenges of bull riding are nothing compared to the struggles of everyday life.
For 10 years, director André Hörmann (who returns to the Festival after his Chicago-set Ringside) visited with Crowley and his family members, observing them with sensitivity and sympathy. While the film initially shows many of the tropes familiar to cowboy life—a culture rooted in masculinity and ruggedness—such hardened layers quickly peel away, revealing the vulnerabilities and fragilities that lie beneath the surface. A longitudinal and piercing coming-of-age docu-drama, The Cowboy penetrates stereotypes to reveal a complex portrait of life in the American heartland.
Screenings & Events
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Film Credits
- Heike Kunze
- André Hörmann
- Vincent Assmann
- Tom Bergmann
- Roger Goula
- telekult Film, Mitten Media
Sponsors
Program Partner
Program Patron
Cynthia Stone Raskin
With support from
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