Local animator Jodie Mack curates Chi(a)nimation All-Stars, a program of Chicago animators, including several professors and students from the School of the Art Institute, Sunday at Nightingale.

The program features Jim Trainor's violent torn paper stop motion inspired by log ants Leafy Leafy Jungle; Andrew Stewart's photocopier-made Errata; Lale Westvind's Flesh Gun, in which "moustachioed perverts in a spaceship fire upon a deformed, nude woman daily"; Gonzalo Escobar's doll and toy meditation Strategies of Trust; Lisa Barcy's cutout and sand romance Mermaid; Jon Satrom's EAGPOSTMUCNG; Basia Goszcynska's Land Escape; Emily Kuehn's The realTime and Life of John James Audubon; Lori Felker's Zwischen; Clara Kim's cutout Doppelgänger, Jared Larson's "Photoshop craziness" Abnliumearteidon; Ernest Kim's ink-and-paint ship-in-a-bottle tale Oh, My Captain!; Carolina Gonzalez Valencia's cutout and puppet a-part from The Story; and Matt Marsden's "collaborative animated unearthly train ride" Boxcartoon. 

It's Sunday at 6 PM, followed by an 8 PM show of Seattle animation curated by Stefan Gruber, at Nightingale, 1084 N. Milwaukee.

19 years after his groundbreaking 1973 feature debut Touki Bouki, Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambety adapted Friedrich Durrenmatt's Swiss play The Visit for his 1992 second feature Hyenas, screening tonight in the Black World Cinema series at Chatham 14 theater. 

A wealthy woman returns to her home village and offers the townspeople a fortune to kill a local shopkeeper who impregnated and abandoned her when she was a girl.  Jonathan Rosenbaum called it "a comic allegory about contemporary colonialism, consumerism, and their relation to each other."

Hyenas screens tonight at 7 PM at 210 W. 87th St. $5.

The Black World Cinema series runs the first Thursday of every month.  It'is hosted by Floyd Webb, profiled in Dan Kelly's 2006 Reader cover story about his documentary The Search for Count Dante on notorious 70s martial arts guru John Keehan.

John Commare's short film The Beautiful People tells the story of two trust fund kids who get cut off by their families.

The Beautiful People, produced by Coincidence Films with actor/executive producer Steven James Price (The Beast),  screens Thursday at River East Art Center, alongside a show by artists from the River East art education program Project 465, and live painting of Michael Jackson portraits.

It's free, from 5:30-8:30 PM at 435 E. Illinois.

Alexandra Billings sits beside a politiian's corpse in a hotel room and phones her sister for help.  So begins Stealth, the first starring film role for the Pride Parade grand marshal, transgender actress and activist.  Stealth screens Tuesday at the Center on Halsted.

Born Scott Billings in Schaumburg in 1962, Billings spent her early childhood as an LA theatre brat, moving back to Chicago at age 10.  She started her career with cabaret drag performance here. 

She debuted her one woman show Before I Disappear here in 1993.  In 2003 she was the first male-to-female transgender performer to play a transgender character on TV, in the ABC TV movie Romy and Michelle: In the Beginning.

Combining a potboiler plot with her own trasngender experience, director Marlo Bernier wrote the 20-miniute Stealth with co-producer Jennifer Fontaine, who co-stars along with Elizabeth J. Martin. Music is by transgender singer-songwriter Namoli Bennett.

$20 ticket proceeds will be split between the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame and the production of a feature-length version of the film.

Stealth screens Tuesday at 8 PM at the Center on Halsted Hoover-Leppen Theater, 3656 N. Halsted.  $20 includes a post-screening reception with food and wine from Ann Sather.  Billings, Bernier and Fontaine will attend.

Trailer contains graphic disturbing content.

When I was 22 years old a friend and I moved into a second-floor apartment at the northwest corner of Pratt and Sheridan in Rogers Park. For a yahoo just out of college, it was the perfect place to live. We'd sit on our balcony drinking beer and watching girls walk by, and we'd invite them up to join us (they never did). Or we'd take our cheap guitars, walk a couple blocks east to the beach, drink beer, jam, and hope the cops wouldn't bust us (they never did).

But for me, the best part about living there was the movie theater across the street—the 400—which played second-run features and cost only a couple bucks. The place didn't serve beer, but it didn't need to, because I could hang around at my place until 9:29 and be in my seat watching the opening credits at 9:30. I must have gone to the 400 at least once a week; when the theater ran Pee Wee's Big Adventure, my roommate and I saw it three or four times.

I'm more than twice as old now, and the 400 has been around the block a few times too: it became the Village North Theater for a while, then shut down. Tonight, following a $4 million renovation by developer Tony Fox, it reopens as the New 400 Theater. Screening this week are Up, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, and, uh, The Hangover.

Also this week, Facets Cinematheque presents a week-long engagement of Big Man Japan (2007), a hilarious take on the atomic-monster movie. We have new reviews of Cheri, an adapation of Colette starring Michelle Pfeiffer and directed by Stephen Frears; In a Dream, a documentary profile of Philadelphia mosaicist Isaiah Zagar by his son, Jeremiah; My Sister's Keeper, the new weepie from screenwriter Jeremy Leven and director Nick Cassavetes, who last collaborated on The Notebook; The Stoning of Soraya N., a timely drama about the killing of an Iranian woman by her god-fearing neighbors; Whatever Works, the latest from Woody Allen; A Wink and a Smile, which looks at the neo-burlesque scene in Seattle; and Year One, a comedy with Jack Black and Michael Cera from Chicago's own Harold Ramis.

This week Doc Films presents John Carpenter's first feature, Dark Star (1974), screening Thursday, and Alfred Hitchcock's last, Family Plot (1973), screening tonight. But your best bet this week is Film Center's Saturday double feature of two extraordinary romances by Max Ophuls: The Earrings of Madame de... (1953), screening at 3 PM, and Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948), screening directly afterward at 5 PM. The first movie repeats on Thursday at 6 PM, the second on Tuesday at 6 PM.

Filming at 17,000 feet in the remote Himalayan region of Zanskar, Frederick Marx ran out of breath. 

Forced to focus on suriviving the extreme altitude, Marx instructed his younger, Colorado-bred cinematographer to stick with the lead party: two Tibetan monks  leading a group of 17 handpicked children to a new school at the Stongde Monastery in neighboring Ladakh.

Isolated in the Himalayas on the Northern tip of India, bordering Tibet and Pakistan, Zanskar is considered the last stronghold of traditional Tibetan Buddhist practice, and it's threatened now by poverty, environmental degradation, and globalization.  The Dalai Lama has empowered these two monks to preserve Zanskar's cultural heritage through an educational campaign.

Marx, producer and editor of seminal local basketball documentary Hoop Dreams, returns to Chicago after 10 years on the West Coast, for two preview screenings this weekend of his work-in-progress documentary Journey from Zanskar.

It screens Friday and Saturday at 7:30 PM at Primitive, 130 N. Jefferson. Marx will attend both screenings.  Friday screening is $50.  Saturday's screening is $250 and features Year One director and Highland Park resident Harold Ramis, composer Michael Fitzpatrick, cocktails, h'ors d'oeuvrres and valet parking.  Tax deductible admissions goes toward completion expenses for the film (including narration by Richard Gere).

California has had its share of earthquakes over the decades, but the shock waves emanating from Beverly Hills on Wednesday had nothing to do with shifting tectonic plates. Sid Ganis, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, announced that the 82nd Academy Awards, scheduled for March 7, 2010, would feature ten nominees for the Best Picture Oscar—twice the current number. The news of this return to an earlier practice surprised many industry insiders; following are reactions from a range of film professionals I canvassed in Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago.

Ziggy Kozlowski is a partner in Block-Korenbrot Public Relations, an LA-based firm that specializes in movie and TV awards campaigns and has shepherded such films as Howards End, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Capote, and Crash to Oscar wins. "Part of the problem," he says, "is that lately some of the big Hollywood hits like The Dark Knight, which were also critically acclaimed, didn't get nominated in the best-film category. This might be a move toward more populist, less elitist choices. With ten nominees in the final category of the show the Academy might be hoping that the winner won't be such a foregone conclusion. The change also might make it possible for a foreign-language film to be nominated for Best Picture."

Director Harold Ramis, a voting member of the Academy, observes with a laugh that his current film, Year One, won't be getting any awards, but comments, "Our best pictures are often not our most popular films....Interest in the Oscar telecast declines if viewers don't get to see clips from the movies they love. One of the reasons the Academy had big movie stars announce the nominations on the last broadcast—with five different stars introducing the five nominees in the top acting categories—is that the presenters were better known than the nominated pictures. They injected some glamour into the telecast. Hollywood is synonymous with glamour, but recent nominees like The Reader, Milk, and Frost/Nixon are not. This is my theory: it's about the broadcast; it is not about the awards."

A publicity executive in the New York office of one of Hollywood's oldest studios, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said, "I was shocked—I hadn't even heard any rumors about it. Change happens so slowly at the Academy; it took years to get the Best Animated Film category introduced, and then out of the blue they announce this expansion. God only knows how that's going to affect the awards campaigns, but it will be great for the trades like Variety and the Hollywood Reporter"—which carry "for your consideration" ads aimed at voters. "The question is, when you extend the field to ten, will moviegoers see all ten? It's hard enough to see five. Then again, maybe the extra five on the list will be ones people have already seen. Right now, Up and Star Trek stand out as two that might be nominated."

For the past three years the Gene Siskel Film Center has been the official, Academy-endorsed host of Chicago's Oscar party, held the night of the awards. Jean de St. Aubin, the Film Center's executive director, says, "It's kind of nice, this change, because it might bring new ideas to the table. It's like what the Golden Globes does, although its ten best-picture nominees are divided into two categories"—drama, and musical or comedy. Michael Kutza, founder and artistic director of the Chicago International Film Festival and ever the champion of foreign cinema, adds, "I think it's an interesting move. It opens the door for a broader range of films to get recognition and be considered for the top honor. And it'll make for a five-hour television show!"

While volunteering for the Peace Corps in the South Pacific archipelago of Tonga, filmmaker Brian Favorite encountered the Fakaleitis, boys and men who are raised as girls by their families from childhood.  Favorite screens his 21-minute documentary Like a Lady – The Fakaleitis of Tonga tonight at Unity in Chicago Church.

"Traditional belief says this occurs when a family may have only male children and deem it necessary to teach one of the boys cooking, cleaning, weaving, sewing – chores associated with a daughter – thus behaving as if a girl," Favorite says. "Homosexuality is sometimes the motivation, but not always. Looked on with fascination and disdain, Fakaleitis are a unique, yet vital part of Tongan culture."

Like a Lady screens at 7 PM at 1925 W. Thome, along with Hawaiian music by Aloha Lives and Polynesian dance by Carole Lanialoha Lee-Sumberg of Kupa'a Pacific Island Resources and friends.  $12 tickets go to complete a feature-length version of the film.

"My only weapon of defense is that I won't leave this place," says Abu Sagr, a resident of the Jordan Valley, in the documentary This Palestinian Life: Stories of a Palestinian Nonviolent Resistance, screening tonight at the Wellington United Church of Christ.

Living in Palestine as a relief and development worker from 2005 to 2007, Egyptian-German student Philip Rizk encountered the practice of sumoud, or perseverence, a form of nonviolent resistance against the Israeli occupation.  This became the inspiration for Rizk's documentary, which portrays the daily lives of Palestinian villagers and Bedouin. 

Rizk was briefly imprisoned and interrogated by Egyptian security forces last February after participating in a protest against the Isreali incursion into Gaza.

Rizk will speak live after the screening via Skype.  Rabbi Brant Rosen of the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation of Evanston moderates a panel featuring Usama Houlila of Arab Jewish Partnership for Peace and Kathy Kelly of Voices for Creative Non-Violence.

This Palestinian Life screens tonight at 7 and 9 PM at 615 W. Wellington. $5 suggested donation.