Gene Siskel Film Center
Program 10: Yearn to Fly
Saturday, May 11
3:30 p.m. – 69 min
Unreachable by Stella Yoon, 1:20
Figure Drawing by Madolyn Rusen, 7:00
The Dragon Cage by Ai Jian Chen, 5:13
Alice’s Last Minute by Saxon Wang, 11:07
Red, White, Blue by Wang, Yao-Yi 20:00
Black, White, Grey, Purple by Zach Binroth, 5:00
My Chinchilla is the Demon King by Kaylyn Pierce-Coggins 13:50
This program bounces around a series of uncertainties: strangers come to town, the flighty faux-fictions of animals mythical and domestic, the intergenerational space of the imaginary, diffuse intimacies and sexualities. A fanciful longing fills Stella Yoon’s delightful look at a stingray yearning to fly. Another yearning altogether finds its way to paper and screen in Madolyn Rusen’s hilariously cheeky narrative short about the figures in a figure drawing class. Ai Jian Chen’s sprawling animation brings the mythic into the contemporary as we twist through a world in which dragons may or may not exist, but whose cages and images certainly do. A related paradox of certainty pervades Saxon Wang’s quixotic Alice’s Last Minute, in which a space of imagination and speculation begets a type of resoluteness. Red, Blue and White filters a half century of complicated familial and political history binding the United States and Taiwan through Yao-Yi Wang’s pensive visual diary. Zach Binroth’s animation finds empathic super heroics in the quotidian struggles of asexuals in a hypersexualized society. Finally, we find ourselves grappling with perhaps the most difficult question of all: is the eponymous chinchilla in Kaylyn Pierce-Coggins’ crepuscular cartoon pilot the demon king or just misunderstood?
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