With films from more than a dozen countries screening at venues from Evanston to Pilsen, you wouldn’t be wrong to count “Ism, Ism, Ism: Experimental Cinema in Latin America” (“Ismo, Ismo, Ismo: Cine Experimental en América Latina”) among the most wide-ranging festivals of its kind to appear in Chicago in recent years.
“In the end, we never really came up with a hard definition of what’s Latin American cinema,” said Jesse Lerner, who with Argentine filmmaker and critic Luciano Piazza curated the essays and images in the coffee-table-worthy print catalog for “Ism” ($45, University of California Press). “We have Mexican filmmakers like Paleo Hernandez, who spent his career mostly in France, where he’s celebrated as one of the greats of the French avant-garde even though in Mexico he’s comparatively unknown. Is he a French filmmaker? A Mexican filmmaker? The definitions aren’t easy,” Lerner said.
Through November 16, various locations. For a full schedule, go to blockmuseum.northwestern.edu or ismismism.org,
