Founded in 1975, in a tumultuous heyday of European, Eastern European, Scandinavian and Latin American cinema breaking through to adventurous American movie audiences, Facets Multimedia turns 50 this year. More has changed about the hardy nonprofit Chicago survivor since the days of its booming mail-order rental business than can be recounted. Film itself, and how people will and won’t find it or take a chance on it, has changed no less.
For its golden anniversary, Facets is getting a marketing facelift. No longer titled Facets Multimedia in full name, the organization co-founded by the late Milos Stehlik now officially goes by Facets Film Forum. And Facets, says executive director Karen Cardarelli, now in her fifth year there, has a $1 million fundraising goal to be met by 2027. There’s $250,000 already committed thanks to “a very supportive board,” she says.
Plus new board co-chairs, though not new to Facets. Rich Moskal, longtime head of the Chicago Film Office, oversees the board activities with creative strategist Tamara Bohórquez, connected to Facets for more than a decade.
The “Film Forum” part of its name is more ceremonial than everyday; it’s still Facets, still staking out its piece of Chicago’s film community, but the institutional change to Facets Film Forum suggests a conscious link to the venerable four-screen Film Forum in Greenwich Village, New York, founded in 1970.
But in the same ecosystem as the Gene Siskel Film Center, a program of the School of the Art Institute, and the Music Box Theatre, Chicago’s Facets isn’t really in the game of booking local premieres of first-run international films.
What they’re screening this year and beyond, Cardarelli says, will continue to involve encore runs of work that would otherwise “come and go very quickly. Too quickly.”
Veteran Facets programming director Charles Coleman now leads a seven-person roster of programmers, many with decades of experience there and around the city, some newer to the curation racket. Two of the latter, Emma Greenleaf and Nick Edelberg, work at Facets and last year proposed a monthly anime club with monthly screenings and free ramen. It took a while, as things do, but Cardarelli says they’re drawing close to 100 per screening now.
“We’re learning what the community wants from us,” she says.
Board co-chair Moskal is programming a “Chicago On Screen” series starting March 14, which will include “The Fugitive” and in a darker vein, “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.” In April, Coleman will oversee a five-film, decade-by-decade tribute to the Facets legacy, roping in some stray critics to introduce films that capture something of the place’s history and cinematic values.
More to come, as Facets undergoes a year of looking back and forward both.
For more information, and for upcoming screenings and events, go to facets.org.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
