chicagoans

28:32 min I usa/de 2018 / 2021
experimental documentary

Chicago, USA, Metropolitan Area of almost 10 million residents, place of the worlds first skyscraper and once biggest meatpacking district, presents itself as ‘City of Neighborhoods’ – local divisions according to immigrants’ origins and professions – ruled by psychological defense and real estate speculation.
 
Eight female voices, of early or recent migration to Chicago, in a wide range of age and coming from different cultures and ethnicities – Polish, African American, Mexican, Philippine, Netherlands, Italian, Scottish, Vietnamese – tell about their own experience with the city’s gentrification, sexism and racism.
Their life’s stories, presented in the aural dimension, form echoing patterns of recurring motifs – interwoven through all the distinctive properties of each intonation, rhythm and story. The visual dimension flows like a hypnotic stream with images from a bird’s view of Chicago’s vast, seemingly infinite extensions of rectangular grids of streets with vertical accents of skyscrapers. An urban concretion of abstract structures in monumental and reworked camera takes hovers between the nightmarish and beautiful  – with heightened emphatic listening to these female voices of Chicago…

Dulce M. Diaz
Lisa Jenschke
Heather La Riviere
Dorothy Pytel
Kamilah Rashied
Juanita Salvador-Burris
Eileen Truong
Mary A Young

dramatic advice: Claudia Reiche

Great Thanks to
Megha Ralapati, Michael Kress, Ariel Gentalen, Claudia Reiche, Allison Cochrane,
Betty Brewer, Jörn Staeger

Jackman Goldwasser Residency at the HydeParkArtCenter, Chicago