Ray Pride

Movies from all twenty-five members of the burgeoning European Union are among the forty-three selections of the Siskel Film Center's annual survey, the 8th European Union Film Festival. As always, the festival plays as a coming attractions of spring and summer art-house releases, including the Italian generational epic, "The Story of Our Youth," Lukas Moodysson's latest howl of disappointment, "A Hole in the Heart," Susanna Bier's "The Brothers" and the latest Francois Ozon, "5x2." But there are other treats you might only see here, with little chance of theatrical distribution, such as 81-year-old French master Alain Resnsias' elegant new musical, "Not on the Lips," and the still little-known German maker of troubling thrillers, Christian Petzold, and his 2003 "Wolfsburg." A few out of left field: Steven Lovy's "Mix," from Hungary is a splashy, techno-driven immersion in the Budapest rave scene; and Frederic Fonteyne follows up his talky take on intimacy, "An Affair of Love" with another Belgian-French-Luxembourgese confection, a tense, yet down-to-earth adaptation of a 2002 novel, "Gilles' Wife" (Friday's opening night event), which traces illicit affairs across the four seasons of a working-class French village between the Wars. "Born to Film" could be called "Belgian Movie" for its portrait of three curious middle-aged filmmakers who, as the original title said, had to be "cineastes at any cost." Sixty-six minutes is almost too much time spent with these genre-bent no-budgeters: a high-school teacher, a construction worker and a projectionist.

The 8th European Union Film Festival plays March 4-24 at the Siskel Film Center.

(2005-03-01)

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