At the Chicago International Film Festival in October, the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) announced local filmmaker Daniel Nearing as the first Independent Film Initiative (IFI) Filmmaker in Residence at the Chicago Film Office. As part of the yearlong residency, Nearing will direct an adaptation of the 1900 novel Sister Carrie, which will take place in Chicago, Paris, and Montreal.
In addition to a $10,000 cash grant, Nearing will receive several other incentives from the Chicago Film Office, including a package of industry discounts on equipment rentals and permits, meeting space at the Chicago Cultural Center, and advisory assistance from a team of industry professionals. He also will mentor five “production apprentices” as part of a paid training program for emerging filmmakers that will offer hands-on experience and valuable insight into what goes into making an independent feature.
When Nearing made Chicago Heights, he says he didn’t plan for the film to be the first in a trilogy. “I wanted to tell a richly American story,” he says, “so I took Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and found myself setting it in a black community. I couldn’t afford to make it as an authentic period piece, so I made it when and where I was.” Hogtown furthered the aesthetic that Nearing established in Chicago Heights—a black-and-white, nonlinear, and character-driven interpretation of the African-American experience in a “period-less” Chicago—and Sister Carrie will follow suit.
“More than anything else,” Nearing insists, “it’s about having the weight of this great city behind us, and knowing that we’re in this together. That Chicago is behind us. That’s the greatest honor, I think.”
“That’s a place that we, as a film and production town, have never really been in before, not at this level,” he continues. “It’s an unprecedented and, frankly, exciting time.”
“It’s true that vendors are making a good living by supporting Chicago Fire and Chicago P.D.,” Moskal attests. “But that also means they can then turn around and support independent production by offering lower rates and deals for local filmmakers, because they are smart enough to realize that the local community is just as important and perhaps even more important for the industry here in Chicago.”
