CHICAGO’S CIMMFEST A CULTURAL EXTRAVAGANZA
Published in AXS, April 2015
The Chicago International Movies & Music Festival (CIMMfest) packed 99 concerts, 99 films and dozens of panels into a stretch of Milwaukee Avenue that spanned five subway stops over a mid-April weekend.
From the cushy seats of the Society for the Arts to the big movie screens at the Logan Theater, the program offered such a head-explodingly grand assortment of sights and sounds that the task of picking just one at any given time became an excruciating luxury.
Josh Chicoine, co-founder of CIMMfest and guitarist for the Sabers and Dear Thief, seems to like it like that.
“We’ve been building for seven years now,” he explains. “It’s really wide and that’s what I think people really enjoy.”
Referring to the idea that he hatched at the Green Eye lounge with editor Ilko Davidov in 2008 as “a filmmaker’s type festival” and “a musician’s type festival,” he’s watched the DIY spirit spread from the “storefronts and multiple venues” where many events still go down and onto “a place where people say CIMMfest and don’t need an explanation about what that is any more.”
The awards ceremony, held in Wicker Park’s impressively video-gamed Emporium Arcade on Saturday night, felt more like a celebration than a competition. It opened with a performance by The Claudettes, a band of impeccable grooviness fronted by a mesmerizing chanteuse named Yana who sings in French and looks like she just stepped out of a Carnival parade.
After the set, pianist Johnny Iguana iterated the festival’s unofficial theme. “I told everybody I could that it’s a mistake to simply come to the free Claudettes show,” he said. “Just spend three seconds looking at the documentaries and you’ll agree with me.”
Among the artists on hand to accept the CIMMfest signature trophies were several members of the cast and crew from the Feature Fiction winning “Keep In Touch,” an often humorous and ultimately heartwarming romantic tale that mixes innocent puppy love with creepy online stalking in the hills of upstate New York and the cafes of Brooklyn.
“Today we live in an age where, basically, Facebook allows us to look up anyone,” explains Michael Covino, who not only performed in the movie but also co-wrote it with director and Columbia College grad Sam Kerchmar. “I looked up a girl who I had a thing for as a young kid and, like, years after, found out she died in a car accident and sort of thought that was a really interesting impetus for something to happen to a character.”
Other winners in the crowd included Chicago-based director Kyle Cogan and producer Marty Kane, who teamed up to create a thriller drug dealing themed music video for the song “Dangerous” by St Louis band Shaman’s Harvest. Their encounter with Murphy’s Law during production ranks among the greatest on set mishap stories ever told.
“We were supposed to shoot in this really cool, like, modern barn,” says Cogan. “We went to the location and the guy we rented it from had dumped 600 pounds of corn there. Have you ever seen what 600 pounds of corn looks like?”
Photos by Dan Patton