Sunday, May 31 at 6:00 PM – Gene Siskel Film Center – 164 N State St
Tickets: $13 at the door or purchase in advance
FLY AWAY HOME
Directed by Carroll Ballard • 1996
Best known for The Black Stallion, director Carroll Ballard displays a wildly undervalued talent for making serious family pictures that achieve a Days of Heaven level of grace. Fly Away Home is based on the real-life story of sculptor Bill Lishman, who taught orphaned geese to learn migration patterns by training them to follow him in an ultralight aircraft. The fictionalized adaptation of Lishman’s autobiography stars Anna Paquin and Jeff Daniels as a reunited daughter and father whose relationship is repaired by guiding a flock of geese from Ontario to North Carolina. Sixty geese were raised and trained on the set of this deeply moving and often breathtaking portrait of humans attempting to do right by nature. Fly Away Home amazed kids and adults alike, including the Chicago Reader‘s Jonathan Rosenbaum, who wrote: “At a time when so few American movies believe in anything, it’s cheering and satisfying to see one that believes in geese.” (JA)
107 min • Columbia Pictures • 35mm from the Chicago Film Society collection, permission Sony Pictures Repertory
Preceded by: “Birds of Chicago” (1939) – 10 min – 16mm from the Chicago Film Society collection
“There are individual shots here almost worth the price of admission: Amy on a lawn tractor, leading a parade of geese; the father soaring in his experimental planes, which always seem to land in semi-controlled crashes; Amy and her dad setting off across Lake Ontario, and a stunning shot in which the towers of Baltimore materialize from the mist, and office workers see the little girl and her geese flying past their windows.” – Roger Ebert
From the Collection: This season at the Gene Siskel Film Center we’ll be highlighting prints from the Chicago Film Society’s collection, which has grown over the past decade to include over 3,000 individual items on 16mm, 35mm, and 70mm, most representing movies that aren’t available on film through distribution companies or other archives. We loan prints from the collection to venues all over the world and all over the country (last year over 5,000 non-Chicagoans attended screenings of our prints in other towns), but this is the first time we’re highlighting our collection in a series right here where we live!
NEXT UP: THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS on Sunday, June 7 at the Music Box