At this stage in our nearly year-long exile from cinemas, the text emblazoned on the stairs of the Gene Siskel Film Center now reads like a prophetic asservation: “Just a few more steps to great movies.”
We spoke via Zoom after Fons had completed a long day at her current—and soon-to-be concurrent—job as director of programming at FilmScene in Iowa City, where she attended the University of Iowa as an undergraduate; she’ll continue to work at FilmScene until she becomes full-time at the Film Center. She received her masters in Media Management from Columbia College Chicago, during which time she interned with the Chicago International Film Festival. That internship led to a job as the festival’s education director, a position she held from 2007 to 2016.
Fons is especially compelled by what drives moviegoers’ viewing habits, as the path from the couch to the theater seat has taken on further significance with exhibitors around the world looking forward to a return to in-person programming. “There’s this huge question of, what do people want to see when they come back to the movie theater for the first time in what will be over a year for most people,” she says.
Navigating a more-or-less traditional exhibition space during a global pandemic and various occurrences of societal unrest—during a time when many are taking the arts for granted, as is evidenced by a general disregard for those workers displaced by the crisis—Fons, like others in her position, has her work cut out for her. But still, she’s not willing to let click-bait headlines announcing the death of cinema distract her from what she knows to be true about the communal moviegoing experience.
