The Pen in Hand Guide to the Movies: The Milwaukee Film Festival

Something for Everybody: Festival Season

By Geoff Carter

Milwaukee Film, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

For the Milwaukee film fan, or any cinephile who enjoys straying off the beaten path occasionally, the Milwaukee Film Festival is one of the best times of the year. I like to think of this event as the prelude to Milwaukee’s world-renowned festival season. It’s not as popular, glitzy, or star-studded as Summerfest or as charmingly unique as our ethnic celebrations like German Fest, Festa Italiana, or Bastille Days, but the MKE Film Festival is, in its own way, just as cool and just as distinctive.

It is a uniquely collaborative event with a heart and soul of its own. Not only is the festival a celebration of the works of local filmmakers, it is also a gathering of the community partners determined to make Milwaukee a hotspot for cinematic innovation as well as the host of a world-class movie event.

Sponsored by Milwaukee Film, a nonprofit dedicated to transforming our city into a center of cinematic culture, the festival has become a magnet and a showcase for every facet of the Milwaukee—and international—film community, audience and artist alike. According to its mission statement, “Milwaukee Film is a nonprofit arts organization dedicated to entertaining, educating, and engaging our community through cinematic experiences” (MKEFilm).

Besides providing these singular experiences and supporting local filmmakers, Milwaukee Film is also committed to running the historic, magnificent—and newly restored—Oriental Theater on Milwaukee’s fashionable East Side. MKE Film also supports diverse facets of our community through its Black Lens, Cine Sin Fronteras, Genrequeer, and its Education Programs, all created to elevate the cinematic works and profiles of marginalized and underrepresented populations. The work of these groups is spotlighted in the MKE Film’s Culture and Community Festival, which also helps support these programs.

Oriental Theater Lobby, Milwaukee;
Shadowlink1014, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

But the crown jewel of Milwaukee Film is the two-week festival. The Milwaukee Film Festival has grown to the point where the 2023 event will feature 283 films from over 51 countries, including productions from local artists, favorites from Cannes Film Festival, Sundance, and more. Short films, animations, feature films, documentaries, and more will be screened in-person at Oriental and Avalon Theaters as well as being available through virtual streaming. One of the showpieces this year will be a screening of Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent classic Metropolis, which will be accompanied by The Anvil Orchestra. The film version of Judy Blume’s bittersweet coming-of-age story Hello God, It’s Me, Margaret is also on the schedule.

Live panels featuring actors and filmmakers will also be provided for question-and-answer sessions after the screenings. After we saw Kris Rey’s feature film, I Used to Go Here in 2019, we attended a Q and A session afterwards including Rey and lead actress Gillian Jacobs. It was a treat listening to the artists talk about the process of transforming a vision into a feature film.

During the last few festivals, we’ve seen a number of outstanding films at the festival, including The Bear with Aubrey Plaza, a couple of raucous live showings (dance parties included) of Stop Making Sense, as well as Cool Beansand Smoky Places, two animated shorts by Milwaukee’s (and the Pen in Hand’s) own Michael DiMilo. Unfortunately, many other great films slipped by us. It was inevitable. There’s far too many of them.

One of the major drawbacks—the only drawback as far as I can tell—to the festival is trying to decide which films to attend, which has become a very difficult winnowing process because the variety of offerings is, in truth, an embarrassment of riches. My wife and I sat down the other night trying to figure out what to see. Even though we are Milwaukee Film members and love going to the movies, our schedules made it difficult for us to see more than a few.

Our first choice was Gods of Mexico, a documentary about how rural populations of Mexico who are struggling in the face of progress to preserve their traditional lifestyles. Since we spend a fair amount of time in Mexico, we figured this film might give us some new insights into the Mexican culture.

Our second choice will be one of the animated shorts packages. We haven’t decided which one yet. As I’ve written previously in this blog, my wife and I see the Oscar-nominated short films every year—usually at The Oriental. I am also a fan of the streaming channel Shorts, which exclusively features short movies.

One screening we will definitely be attending is A Disturbance in the Force, a documentary about the inception and creation of “The Star Wars Holiday Special”, which was originally aired in 1978, hot on the heels of the original Star Wars movie’s phenomenal success. The holiday classic, however, is epic—not in its scope—but in its awfulness. My brother-in-law showed me parts of it a few years ago and not only is the production disjointed, idiotic, and just plain weird, but some of the cameos, including those by Diahann Carrol and Harvey Corman, musical numbers by Bea Arthur, and other weirdly integrated music videos, and terribly conceived skits are so bad they are beyond ironic—so kitschy they’re almost sublime.

Apparently, George Lucas wanted to destroy every copy of the program. The special was never aired again and never appeared on home video, yet—perhaps because of this—it has attained a sort of cult film status. It is, however, for the morbidly curious among you, available on YouTube.

A Disturbance in the Force is a documentary about the production of this fiasco. There is sort of a gaper’s curiosity about how this thing was written, produced, made, and approved—and why it was called a holiday special. There’s nothing concerning Hannukah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Festivus, or any other winter festival in it, except for the Wookie holiday Life Day, but that is, at best, misleading to the viewer. Do we usually tune into a Christmas special to celebrate an alien holiday? So, we will be going to not only experience the clueless seventies kitschiness of this production, but to—maybe—understand how it happened.

If you’re in Milwaukee, don’t miss this festival. If you’re not in Milwaukee, try to make it over to our fair city. There is something for everybody at the MKE Festival. There is an updated Frankenstein story, a true story about a family dedicated to making the perfect prosthesis for breast cancer victims, and a harrowing documentary about the first days of the War in the Ukraine. There is also an entire program, Rated K: For Kids, geared toward our half-pint cinephiles. This is not only a gathering and celebration of some of the best films produced both locally and globally, but it is also a consolidation—and an affirmation—of community voices.

Attending this festival is not only a way to expand our own horizons and experience other cultures, but it is also a way to help support a non-profit dedicated to elevating marginalized voices in our community through the medium of film. The festival features the types of films you don’t see every day or even every year. This is an opportunity for film lovers to take a deep dive into the cutting edge of today’s filmmaking, but it’s more than that. It’s a chance to become part of something bigger than any one of us.