Chicago: Sixty Years of CIFF

In the run-up to this year’s sixtieth edition, opening on Wednesday and running through October 27, venues all across the Windy City have spent the past several weeks celebrating the festival’s history. Programs have spotlit crucial moments for CIFF, including the 1967 screening of Martin Scorsese’s first feature, Who’s That Knocking at My Door? “For Scorsese,” writes Kat Sachs in the Chicago Reader, “inclusion in the festival was fortuitous, helping to launch one of the most distinguished careers in American film history. Roger Ebert, in one of his first assignments for the Chicago Sun-Times, wrote that Scorsese’s film ‘made a stunning impact in its world premiere’ at the festival.”

Fittingly, CIFF 2024 will open with another debut feature, Malcom Washington’s The Piano Lesson. In 2015, Washington’s father, Denzel, announced that he intended to oversee adaptations of all ten plays that make up August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle, nine of which are set in the Pennsylvania city’s Hill District, where Wilson was born and raised. As it happens, the outlier, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, is set in Chicago.

Denzel Washington directed, coproduced, and starred in Fences (2016) and coproduced (again with Todd Black) George C. Wolfe’s 2020 adaptation of Ma Rainey. For The Piano Lesson, he’s called in his entire family. His daughter Katia Washington is an executive producer, and John David Washington, Malcolm’s older brother, plays Boy Willie, a sharecropper and ex-con who drives up to Pittsburgh from Mississippi with big plans. Pauletta Washington, Denzel’s wife, and Olivia Washington, Malcolm’s twin sister, play small roles as the same woman in 1936 and in flashbacks to July 4, 1911.

It was on that night when Boy Willie’s father, Boy Charles (Stephan James), and a couple of coconspirators stole a piano hand-carved with a triptych tracing the Charles family’s history from the antebellum home of the Sutters, descendants of the whites who had enslaved the Charles’ ancestors. “The scene, as they hoist and slide the piano from the southern household’s living room to a horse-drawn cart outside, is intermittently lit by the explosions in the sky,” writes Radheyan Simonpillai in the Guardian. “Flashes of red, white, and blue illuminate a thrilling, pivotal moment, as these men take hold of their legacy. Sure, there’s an extravagance to the style, a first-time filmmaker flex, but it works spectacularly.”

In 1936, the piano rests heavily in the home of Doaker Charles (Samuel L. Jackson, who played Boy Willie in the original Yale Repertory Theatre production in 1987), his niece Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler), and her daughter, Maretha (Skylar Smith). Boy Willie intends to sell the piano so he can buy land from the Sutters, but Berniece isn’t about to part with the family’s sole heirloom. Deadwyler is “the heart and soul” of The Piano Lesson, finds Robert Daniels in Screen, and the ’s Lovia Gyarkye agrees that she’s “the center around which all other performances revolve.”

Malcolm Washington’s adaptation, cowritten with Virgil Williams (Mudbound), “feels like it has built Berniece’s character up more,” observes Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri, “and Deadwyler, one of only two major cast members here who didn’t also appear in the 2022 Broadway revival, is quite stunning in the part. The movie effectively becomes her story.”

“Preserving Wilson’s dramatic structure means relaying this story in odd fits and starts,” writes the Telegraph’s Tim Robey, “with some enervating interruptions, as Willie’s friend Lymon (Ray Fisher, ingratiating but too musclebound for his role) and another uncle, the sozzled widower Wining Boy (Michael Potts) grab the spotlight, too. Jackson inhabits the film beautifully, if more gently: in the role of peacemaker and sounding board, he’s the least pushy of all these performers, but finds the music in Wilson’s words and wastes none of it.”

In Chicago, Malcolm Washington will receive the festival’s Breakthrough Award, and John David Washington will be given the Spotlight Award. The Piano Lesson will see a limited theatrical release on November 8 before landing on Netflix on November 22. Then, on December 2, the film will be honored with the 2024 Gotham Awards Ensemble Tribute.

CIFF’s Centerpiece presentation will be Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch, an adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s 2021 novel starring Amy Adams as an artist who gives up her career to raise her son—and discovers that, in the process, she may be turning into a dog. Heller’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015), Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018), and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019) make for “a straight-out-of-the-gate trio of winners,” writes the Guardian’s Benjamin Lee, but Nightbitch is nowhere near “as daring or as mischievous as its name and logline.”

Adams “runs with everything the story throws at her but gets shortchanged by the script,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney, who finds it “disappointing that a book greeted as a feminist fairy tale, which dared to say out loud some dark truths about the more often unspoken conflicts of motherhood, has been defanged. Sure, it’s about a woman who surrenders to primal instincts as a means of clawing back a part of herself that was lost. But the darkness is ameliorated by the need to keep reassuring us that no matter how much mighty female rage she unleashes, her love for her child is never in question.”

Here, a multigenerational tale starring Tom Hanks and Robin Wright and based on the 2014 graphic novel by Richard McGuire, will be the third film by Chicago native Robert Zemeckis to close out an edition of the Chicago International Film Festival. Among the 122 features in this year’s lineup are Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, one of thirteen films in the International Competition; Steve McQueen’s Blitz, which premiered last week in London before closing out the New York Film Festival; Saulė Bliuvaitė’s Toxic, the winner of the Golden Leopard in Locarno; and the new restoration of Ivan Dixon’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973). And Hirokazu Kore-eda will be on hand for a tribute and a six-film retrospective that ranges from After Life (1998) to Broker (2022).