Throw a spatula at this year’s Milwaukee Film Festival, and you’re likely to hit a movie about movies.
One of them, “I Like Movies,” has a title that might double as a tagline for the festival’s 15th annual edition. The something-for-everyone event, which opens Thursday, will present 135 feature films and 148 shorts over 15 days. If watching movies is like eating cake, as Alfred Hitchcock insisted, then maybe it’s fitting that many of the confections on this year’s menu have been leavened by cinephilia.
By my count, the features include a baker’s dozen of fiction and nonfiction works that converge upon the idea of making and loving films. There are documentaries about actress Mary Tyler Moore, video art pioneer Nam June Paik, and, in the case of “Sam Now,” two half-brothers who use decades’ worth of home videos to heal after one of their mothers vanishes. For “Subject,” co-directors Jennifer Tiexiera and Camilla Hall interviewed major figures from the documentary world to investigate the ethical pitfalls of turning the camera on real lives.
Ennio Morricone, who died in 2020 after a prolific, celebrated career as a film music composer (“The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” “The Untouchables”), has earned an epic, 156-minute nonfiction biography. “Ennio” is directed by Giuseppe Tornatore, who, with the help of Morricone, turned 1988’s “Cinema Paradiso” into a beloved story about the power of movies.
Thanks to Blockbuster Video in Brookfield, “Cinema Paradiso” was the first foreign movie I ever rented with my own money. That kind of nostalgia is central to “I Like Movies,” which is set in Ontario 20 years ago and follows an awkward high school striver who works at the local video store while dreaming of New York University’s film school. Although her feature debut is being pitched as a teen comedy, director Chandler Levack has found a relatable subject that spans generations. Whether attending college film clubs in the Sixties, cruising Blockbuster in the Nineties or posting on the social media site Letterboxd today, people have always looked to motion pictures as a means for shaping identities and forging connections.
That’s why, after winning a wager, I once dragged a colleague to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Union Cinema for a double feature of Iranian movies. We bonded over the evening’s second movie, which eventually proved to be my favorite film of 2001. Jafar Panahi’s “The Circle” expressed the kind of serrated social critique that later earned him a notorious 20-year ban on filmmaking. Miraculously, Panahi has continued to work by making cheap movies in secret and smuggling them out of Iran. His latest, “No Bears,” is about a fictional director laboring to finish a movie near the Iranian border, and it arrives during the festival’s first weekend as one of Panahi’s most lauded works.
If we hyperdrive through the festival’s remaining days, we’ll land on the closing night selection “A Disturbance in the Force,” which filters movie love through its inevitable flipside, fan hate. Thirteen million viewers watched the 1978 CBS broadcast of “The Star Wars Holiday Special,” but then the program was frozen in carbonite, never to air again, destined to be remembered only as one of the most reviled television shows in history. This documentary about the infamous debacle has the perfect title and the perfect screening date: May the Fourth.
The contest for best title, though, will be over on opening night, as the festival kicks off with the world premiere of “Mom & Dad’s Nipple Factory,” which sounds like a crass Adam Sandler comedy but instead chronicles one Eau Claire family’s journey through disease and innovation. In fact, it’s a family movie: In the wake of his mother’s mastectomy, director Justin “Justinsuperstar” Johnson records his parents as they try to invent the perfect prosthetic nipple, first to help one breast cancer survivor and then thousands more. The director, participants and crew will be present for a post-screening Q&A.
Director Lisa Cortés will also be in town to introduce the fest’s centerpiece selection, “Little Richard: I Am Everything,” a nonfiction portrait of the early rock’n’roll pioneer Richard Penniman. Other music subjects include Karen Carpenter, the Zombies, Madonna, the Indigo Girls, Max Roach, James Cotton and the Elephant 6 Collective.
In a rare treat for the ears, the Vermont-based Anvil Orchestra will provide live musical accompaniment for “Metropolis” (1927), a certified classic making its third MFF appearance since 2010. Despite being a silent film, Fritz Lang’s sci-fi melodrama about capital and labor has always seemed noisy, shot through with mechanized, feverish images that summon sound, often screaming, squealing and screeching. There’s a low hum at work as we marvel at Lang’s futuristic cityscapes and begin to unravel this Utopia’s perverse underground secrets.
Speaking of mysteries, new this year is the Ultra Secret Midnight Screening. Buy your ticket, take your chances. But be forewarned: This movie, whatever it is, will likely be disreputable, which is why the projector turns on long after your mother’s bedtime.
Among the key feature attractions are “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” a drama about activists becoming saboteurs that earned buzz at the Toronto International Film Festival, and “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” an adaptation of Judy Blume’s iconic coming-of-age novel that screens ahead of its April 28 wide release.
There will also be new works by distinguished filmmakers such as Ira Sachs (“Passages”), Cristian Mungiu (“R.M.N.”) and Quentin Dupieux (“Smoking Causes Coughing”). Retro screenings include Kathleen Collins’ “Losing Ground” (1982) and Gregg Araki’s “The Doom Generation” (1995). A special 50th-anniversary presentation of “Enter the Dragon” will be followed by a live podcast recording as local radio personalities Dori Zori and Kristopher Pollard discuss Bruce Lee’s martial arts classic.
COVID-19 may have forever disrupted how movies are put in front of eyeballs, but three years on many filmmakers favor a return to traditional distribution. After two virtual-only festivals and last year’s hybrid event, Milwaukee Film has been forced to curtail its online options. About one-third of the features (and most of the shorts) will be available to stream, but only to all-access passholders and only from May 1-7.
Venues include the Oriental Theatre, the Times Cinema and the Avalon Theater. That roster mirrors last year but remains halved compared to 2019, when, before the pandemic, six theaters were used.
The festival runs Thursday through May 4. The full lineup and ticket information are online at mkefilm.org/mff.