ECC kicks off spring film series with 'Searching for Sugar Man'
Screen the best in foreign cinema this spring during the Elgin Community College Humanities Center's International Film Series. Held the first and second Friday of each month, the series is part of the center's effort to foster cross-cultural understanding through cinema.
Screenings are held in the Arts Center, Building H, Room H142, 1700 Spartan Drive, Elgin. Admission is free, but donations will be accepted to help support ECC study-abroad scholarships.
For information about the film series and to view trailers of this spring's featured films, visit www.ecchumanities.org/ifs.
• See "Searching for Sugar Man" at 7:30 p.m. Fridays, March 7 and 14. In the early 1970s, Sixto Rodriguez was a Detroit folk singer who had a short-lived recording career with only two critically well received but non-selling albums. However, unknown to Rodriguez, his musical story continued in South Africa where he had become a pop music icon and an inspiration for youth alienated by apartheid.
After being rumored to be dead by suicide, a few fans in the 1990s decided to seek out the truth of their hero's fate. What follows is a bizarrely heartening story in which they found far more in their quest than they ever hoped, and a Detroit construction laborer discovered that his lost artistic dreams had come true after all.
The film won the Academy Award for "Best Documentary Feature" in 2012 and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award for "Best Documentary."
• The film, "Nostalgia for the Light" will be shown at 7:30 p.m. Friday, April 4. On mountain tops located in one of the driest places on earth, Chile's Atacama Desert, astronomers from all over the world gather to observe the stars. The sky is so translucent that it allows them to see right to the boundaries of the universe.
The harsh heat of the desert sun keeps human remains intact, including pre-Columbian mummies, 19th century miners and the remains of political prisoners that "disappeared" after the military coup of September 1973. So while astronomers examine the most distant and oldest galaxies, the surviving relatives of those who disappeared are at the foot of the mountains searching for the remains of their loved ones, to reclaim their families' histories.
Visit elgin.edu/arts for more information about the ECC Arts Center, including video clips of upcoming artists and events, the Standing Room Only blog, and links to the Arts Center's Twitter and Facebook pages.