Daniel Nearing
As the Black Harvest Film Festival is wrapping up, there is still time to catch some interesting works. Daniel Nearing’s new film, Hogtown, is considered his most ambitious and accomplished yet. Filmed in black-and-white, set against the backdrop of the 1919 Chicago race riots; the story centers on a police manhunt for a missing millionaire in a snowstorm. Although this is a fictional story, it is based on true events.
This is your third film. Why did you decide on a mystery?
The film’s mystery plot — the investigation into the disappearance of a wealthy theater owner — is very much an illusion. The film’s primary aim from sequence to sequence is to arrive at individualized epiphanies, or still points in the characters’ turning worlds. There is a larger mystery here, though, in the hero’s search for “the missing man.” The truth is, the missing man he seeks is himself, not the theater owner. He is trying to find his own identity and a sense of dignity in a world that constantly denies dignity to him. The truer mystery here is a bit Paul Auster-esque.
You address a number of dark social themes in the film. What would you say is the connecting theme throughout the picture?
Hogtown wrestles with a century’s worth of inter-racial struggle and the birth of a new multicultural America, but more than anything it’s a study of isolation, longing, and loneliness in the individual experience.
The film is full of flawed characters. What was the character development like? And where did you find the actors?
All of these characters are lost in their own worlds, their own quiet struggles for identity and respect, and in their aggregate, they define a city. Some of them are based on the experiences of real historical figures, others are composites based on the realities of life for Asian and Latino Americans nearer the turn of the last century. Many of them are manifestations of me and my own flaws and insecurities. I’ve used the film to explore my fears in many respects.
Tell me about your filmmaking experience.
I worked as a broadcast documentary filmmaker in Canada for a decade, making prime time projects for Discovery, Bravo!, The Sports Network and CBC. I moved to Chicago in 2001. I’ve developed a Master of Fine Arts program in Independent Filmmaking for Governors State University while pursuing my love for making dramatic films. My preferred medium now is black-and- white. Something about it seems more real to me than color.
Screenings are Friday, Aug. 22 and Monday, Aug. 25, at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 164 N. State St. Director Daniel Nearing, actor Herman Wilkins, and selected cast and crew members will be present for audience discussion at both screenings. The Black Harvest Film Festival runs Aug. 1-28, 2014. www.siskelfilmcenter.org/blackharvest_2014
