CHICAGO — The 28th Black Harvest Film Festival, which kicks off this weekend and continues through Nov. 20 in person at the Gene Siskel Film Center, will not be like the previous 27.
Co-founder and chief programmer Sergio Mims died in October, a significant loss for Chicago film. Opening night, and all across this year’s festival, tributes to Mims should serve to remind audiences of the unique combination of curator, critic, educator and cinephile.
Mims did a lot of work on the programming in the last months of his life. Film Center director of programming Rebecca Fons and programming intern Nick Leffel watched this year’s pool of submissions and finalized the calendar. But the results, the range and the spirit are pure Sergio.
“His influence and curation runs through Black Harvest,” Fons told me Thursday. From the start, she said, a 30th anniversary screening of the Reginald Hudlin/Eddie Murphy comedy “Boomerang” (7 p.m. Nov. 20) topped Mims’ last of revival priorities.
“It was always his closing night choice,” Fons noted, and it’ll be an occasion for audiences to “come dressed in your ‘90s best,” as the Film Center website puts it, for a post-screening reception.
Two other key titles of the last 50 years of mainstream Black cinema — director Sidney Poitier’s “Buck and the Preacher” (6 p.m. Nov. 9) and director Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X” (7:15 p.m. Nov. 19) — flesh out this year’s repertory titles. There’s also a rarity once considered lost: the restored 1973 Oakland-filmed crime drama “Solomon King,” screening 9 p.m. Nov. 11. The seminal Chicago title “Cooley High” (8 p.m. Nov. 16) brings it home, though it’s hardly the only Chicago movie included in this year’s array of new and older features, short film programs, events and receptions.
Example: If you missed the PBS “American Masters” premiere earlier this year of “Marian Anderson: The Whole World in Her Hands,” an unusually fine documentary directed by Illinois native Rita Coburn Whack, Black Harvest is providing a well-deserved showcase for it (6:15 p.m. Sunday).
Mims always had an eye toward homegrown talent. He also knew a great deal about classical and operatic music. For a lot of reasons, Fons said, the Marian Anderson doc, an artfully finessed portrait of the great contralto, was “the very first film Sergio said he wanted to include this year.”
Mims and Fons spent April through June this year watching submissions for the 2022 festival, Fons said, “meeting regularly to talk about what we liked and what we felt would be a good fit. Our conversations would be varied, and usually included some industry shoptalk and musings on new films in theaters that we were both planning to see. We’d inevitably end up talking about politics and shaking our heads, but the conversation always started and concluded with film.”
Friday’s opening-night program, hosted by NBC-5′s LeeAnn Trotter, comprises a shorts-film program; the presentation of the Black Harvest Legacy Award, this year being given to producer, casting director, author and Columbia College and Harpo Productions alum Sharon King; and the first of the festival’s tributes to Mims.
The taste, of course, is bittersweet. But this year’s festival also reminds us of what one man accomplished in a too-short lifetime devoted to cinema in every possible context.
I wish I had known him longer, and better. He was great fun, a great on-camera sparring partner; we ended up on WTTW’s “Chicago Tonight” a couple of times together and his tastes were stunningly broad and informed. The last time I saw him, just a few weeks before his death, he shared photos of himself on stage at the TCM Classic Film Festival with TCM co-host and Academy Museum of Motion Pictures president Jacqueline Stewart. It was, he said, the greatest moment of his career.
What I remember, mainly, is the time we shared in screening rooms. One time, we were going on about the Stanley Donen MGM musical “It’s Always Fair Weather” — I believe it was a nonacademic discussion of Cyd Charisse’s dance number, “Baby, You Knock Me Out” — and Mims mentioned the Michael Kidd solo number that got cut. I hadn’t heard about that. It’s floating around on YouTube, he said. “It’s amazing.” And it was.
I have no idea what movie we saw that day. Statistically it wasn’t likely to be memorable, but I remember talking with Sergio. May he rest well, and may his spirit hover long in the vicinity of State Street and the Film Center.
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Black Harvest Film Festival, Nov. 4-27, Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.; full schedule at siskelfilmcenter.org/blackharvest.
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