Last week I had the pleasure of attending a screening here in the city of the new movie Petersburg, held at the great Chicago Filmmakers up in the Andersonville neighborhood. The film is the latest to be produced by this really intriguing organization in Chicago called Split Pillow; they're basically a non-profit in the city that exists to help unsigned, experimental, and other underground filmmakers. The core of their activities for the six years they've been together has been a massive collaborative project and mini-festival each Memorial Day weekend called "The Challenge;" as the group has gotten bigger and better-funded, they've also begun producing individual movies shot and edited here in the Chicago area.

Petersburg itself, by the way, is pretty great indeed; a group project very similar in both tone and style to the "mumblecore" films highlighted here two weeks ago, it is in fact a modern retelling of the infamous Russian Revolution novel St. Petersburg by Andrei Bely. (Bely, for those who don't know, is a rather obscure author in the West but beloved in his native Russia; no less than Vladimir Nabokov, for example, once declared St. Petersburg one of the four greatest novels of the 20th century.) It was incredibly smart of the filmmakers, I think, to adapt such a project to modern-day Chicago, because the parallels are strong and come unforced -- how Chicago, for example, has one of the most active and organized groups of revolutionary radical liberals in the entire United States right now, how things with Bush and his cronies these days eerily resemble Russia in the Tsarist era. When we watch the unshaven, overeducated white kids in Petersburg plotting terrorist attacks under the shade of Chicago's Haymarket Riot memorial, it is scarily easy to imagine such meetings actually taking place in the real world; add to this the interesting dynamic of one of the revolutionary's dads being part of the "Halliburton Thugs," so to speak, who has recently decided to run for national office himself, and you have yourself one very entertaining low-budget political thriller on your hands.

Anyway, Petersburg will be running at Chicago Filmmakers every Friday for the rest of the month; the location is 5243 N Clark, and screenings are at 8:30 pm and cost $8 to attend. Don't forget, Split Pillow is also hosting what undoubtedly promises to be a pretty fun fundraiser on October 25th, down at a private condo in the Loop with a patio that overlooks Millennium Park; I'll be there too, interviewing the group's founder Jason Stephens for a future episode of the CCLaP Podcast. The cost is $35 and more information can be found at the Split Pillow website. Do yourself a favor and go see Petersburg when you can; it's definitely a much better alternative on a Friday night than the crap Hollywood is mostly churning out these days.