

To celebrate the 100th birthday of America's most audacious writer, William S. Burroughs, Chicago Humanities Festival brings together a motley crew of poets, writers, and musicians. William Seward Burroughs (1914 - 1997) was an American writer and visual artist. He was a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author whose influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs's needs took him across the United States, down into Mexico, to Europe and beyond. On his travels, he meets up with various members of the underground drug and "outcast" cultures.
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To celebrate the 100th birthday of America's most audacious writer, William S. Burroughs, Chicago Humanities Festival brings together a motley crew of poets, writers, and musicians. William Seward Burroughs (1914 - 1997) was an American writer and visual artist. He was a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author whose influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs's needs took him across the United States, down into Mexico, to Europe and beyond. On his travels, he meets up with various members of the underground drug and "outcast" cultures.
2014-11-01
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5.8Archival footage, animation and music are used to look back at the eight anti-war protesters who were put on trial following the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
0.0A portrait of Norwegian poet Odd Børretzen in his own words, featuring musical highlights from Børretzen's work with musicians Alf Cranner and Lars Martin Myhre.
0.0A child of the Beat Generation, Gérald Leblanc conjoined urban-ness and American-ness, wandering and belonging, far beyond the boundaries of taboo. In so doing, he helped propel Acadia into the modern era.
0.0Howl is an homage to the reading rituals of the Beat poets, to Wholly Communion, to 1965, to Allen Ginsberg, to Jack Kerouac, to William Burroughs, to all those books that we believe to be published in heaven, and to all the restless spirits, from these lands. The film documents the translator of the poem Howl into Turkish, accompanied by a musician.
The story of how Everett Leroy Jones became Amiri Baraka, from his childhood to the mid '60s, is told through interviews recorded in the late '90s.
0.0In a film bursting with lyrics, pictures, and music the director shows us a way into the peculiar universe of Tóroddur, and the otherwise not very talkative artist gives us a glimpse of his thoughts on art, God, life and death.
6.0Based on an incident in the life of Beat icon Neal Cassady and his wife, the painter Carolyn, the film tells the story of a railway brakeman whose wife invites a respected bishop over for dinner. However, the brakeman's Bohemian friends crash the party, with comic results. Pull My Daisy is a film that typifies the Beat Generation. Directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, Daisy was adapted by Jack Kerouac from the third act of his play, Beat Generation; Kerouac also provided improvised narration.
4.7Big Sur is a film adaptation of the Jack Kerouac autobiographical novel of the same name.
0.0Set in a nightmarish Bardo, a place between death and rebirth, a tormented writer faces down demons of his own making. Forced to confront the darkest moment in his life, he mines fractured and repressed memories for a way out. A woman is at the center of all the writer’s afterlife encounters. She is the subject of his life’s greatest regret, and she materializes everywhere in this Otherworld. The writer cannot detach any thoughts of his life from her.
4.8A disillusioned writer explores the subterranean depths of San Francisco's North Beach district.
0.0Jack Kerouac returns to earth as an angel with the goal of changing the life of a struggling writer.
0.0An immersive beat poem written and created for the misunderstood, the marginalized, and the magical.
0.0For years, a secret society of hyper-geniuses and anarchistic whiz kids at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology worked and played at devising a method of card counting that would take the gambling world by surprise. This is their story.
0.0The term “shadow children” is largely unknown in our society. It is about children who live with a terminally ill sibling. The entire attention of the parents is directed to the sick child. The healthy children are in the “shadow”, they take on tasks for which they are still far too young, they fill the family gaps that open up due to the overwhelm of the parents. Often enough, it seems like it is the days in the hospice the healthy children long for since here they are relieved of all burdens for a few hours.
7.0Germany, 1970: Students Karl-Heinz and Hedi try to find a way to be together from across the Iron Curtain, with her in the East and him in the West. Under the pressure of the GDR’s secret police, Karl-Heinz can’t move to East Germany and eventually, Hedi has to leave the country. Her escape, disguised as a holiday trip to Romania, goes wrong in many ways.
0.0From the second floor of his coincidental new home, the filmmaker observes his surroundings; a vast green marshland with birds, animals, a pond and people. The filmmaker wonders whether there could be a space in the absence of stories or whether the camera forces spaces to create stories for its own survival.
7.0In Gascony, a sparsely populated region in the southwest of France, lives Dr. Jean Cadéot, a ninety-year-old veterinarian who continues to work tirelessly and still enjoys doing so. Although his eyesight is getting worse and worse, he treats his animal patients with all his senses and all his love.
Weathering intertwines the deeply personal stories of two Black key workers as they reveal their experiences of racism in the UK. The film explores the impact of the UK government-imposed Covid-19 lockdowns, and the worldwide anti-racism movement which grew after the murder of George Floyd. Both events have acted as a magnifying glass for the inequalities that exist within British society.