CIFF 2026: A City in the Forest, Going for Home, While We Are Here

Of all the documentaries playing at this year’s Chicago International Film Festival, Lev Omelchenko and Nolan Huber’s “A City in the Forest” is easily the angriest and most sorrowful. The story it tells begins in Atlanta in 2020 with archival footage of an encounter between police and a man named Rayshard Brooks in a parking lot at Wendy’s, where an intoxicated Brooks had dozed off behind the wheel of his car, which ended with Brooks being shot and killed (we do not see the actual killing), an event which kicked off days of protests in the streets. In response, then-Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms announced a proposal for a brand-new, ultra-modern, corporate-sponsored police training facility. This might sound like a particularly tone-deaf response, but to make matters worse, the location chosen for this proposed “world-class training camp” (whose design suggests something out of a Paul Verhoeven film) is an urban forest located in a primarily African-American area of the city where over 342 acres of trees are scheduled to be razed. Over the next three years, Omelchenko and Huber cover attempts to stop the project and save the forest. Several activists break into the woods and set up camp to defend the forest and sabotage the construction company’s vehicles; the film debates the efficacy of these actions, with one person calling them “Waffle House crazy.” While these actions have some effect in delaying the project, the city does fight back by staging a police raid in which one young man, known as Tortuguita, is shot 57 times by police in what they call a case of self-defense (though no concrete proof is ever offered along these lines), and 23 others are charged with domestic terrorism. These actions spark more protests and inspire hundreds of locals to attend a 15-hour city council meeting, where they speak out against spending millions in city money to build the facility. When the vote inevitably passes, people take to the streets again, this time to gather signatures for a petition to put the proposed funding on the ballot and let voters decide. “A City in the Forest” is not exactly an objective documentary by any stretch of the imagination. Although the filmmakers do not overtly editorialize on the story as it unfolds, it is clear that they are on the side of the activists and are outraged by the heavy-handed actions of the city towards its citizens, both in the brutality of the police and the equally horrifying ways in which their attempts to work within the democratic system are rebuffed. (This approach gets interesting when it comes to how they handle the activists destroying the construction company’s equipment—although it doesn’t come right out and say it, there is still the implicit message that while such actions should not be advocated, they, at least in this case, do actually work.) The film recounts the events in a way that keeps viewers engaged even if they already know how it turns out, and it even adds a few nice stylistic touches that enhance rather than distract. Even though the story recounted is grim, “A City in the Forest” presents it in a way that will leave viewers feeling angry at the injustices that they have witnessed but at the same time leaving them with the sense that people coming together and taking collective action to fight against those injustices can indeed make some kind of difference in the end. Eric Simonson’s “Going for Home,” by contrast, is a far more conventionally life-affirming work. This one kicks off with a recounting of the Eaton Canyon Fire that sprang up in Southern California in January 2025, in which the Santa Ana winds blew the flames into nearby towns like Altadena, where more than 9,000 buildings were destroyed, 19 people lost their lives, and many families lost their homes and possessions. In the face of such devastation, it would seem that something as seemingly frivolous as Little League baseball would be the least of the community’s considerations. However, the community decided that the Central Altadena Little League team would indeed play that season to provide at least some continuity for the children, many of whom had just had their entire lives uprooted. Simonson observes the players over the course of their strange, ultimately consequential season while also looking at the larger picture of the community and its efforts to come together and rebuild in the wake of such a complete catastrophe. Executive-produced by Paul Giamatti and John C. Reilly (the latter also contributes a song heard over the end credits), “Going for Home” tells an undeniably heartwarming story filled with good intentions, but it never quite becomes a compelling film. As it turns out, the story of the kids and their baseball team doesn’t really take hold until the film’s second half, with the first half tackling not just the fire and the destruction it caused but also the sometimes troubled history of Altadena and how the West Altadena properties are now being bought up on the cheap by outside investors. This is a valuable story, of course, but it needs a deeper dive than this to be effective. As for the kids and their improbable season, it is a nice story, but as presented, it never goes beyond that because the film never lets us get to know them beyond repeated references to their resilience. Although “Going for Home” is certainly well-meaning, likable, and crowd-pleasing, it never feels like anything more than a “SportsCenter” profile stretched uneasily to 90 minutes. More intriguing is “While We Are Here,” a film co-produced by Karemquin Films and directed by Chicago-based artist Reveca Torres. Having been paralyzed as a result of a car accident, Torres finds herself contemplating the challenges of disabled artists to create works of art that allow them to express the complexities of their own lives. This leads her to delve into the lives of three famous artists who also suffered from various forms of disabilities—Frida Kahlo, Vincent Van Gogh, and Henri Matisse—and engage in imagined dialogues with them in which she contemplates their histories, the works they were able to produce both in spite of and as a direct result of their conditions. At the same time, Torres becomes involved in the production of a show in which all of the artists involved have some form of physical or mental disability and compares and contrasts their approaches to those of their famed predecessors as well as their hopes that works by contemporary disabled artists like themselves will one day be accepted in the mainstream art canon. This description may not make “While We Are Here” sound particularly interesting, but the film itself is quite compelling. Torres is an engaging onscreen guide, and as a director, she uses visual techniques like mounting the camera directly on her wheelchair to give viewers a direct look at her perspective. The film also offers a lot of thought-provoking ideas about the artistic process in general and particularly in regard to disabled artists, both in the practical matters and challenges of trying to properly express their ideas through bodies that may not fully allow them to do such things and in the ways in which attitudes towards the disabled can cause their works to be marginalized. (When Torres goes to Europe to study Henri Matisse further, the people representing his work insist to her that he was not disabled.) “While We Are Here” is an intimate, deeply personal work by Torres, but it presents ideas about the tension between the desire for artistic expression and the challenges of living with disability in a way that viewers of all types can easily respond to.

This article is sourced from Roger Ebert. For the full story: