Part of the Ackland Film Forum Fall 2022 series “Art and Artifice” co-organized by the UNC Film Studies Program and the Ackland Art Museum. 

ABOUT THE SERIES: 

Art and Artifice

In movies we allow our imaginations to touch the realities of our world. The films that impact us most are often those that are not true, but could be. Artists, behind and in front of the camera, give us license to dream and fear. In this series, we explore films that engage and expand the idea of creativity. From sculptors to dressmakers, performers to survivors, these films all ask what it means to create art in the cinema.

The series is presented by the Ackland Art Museum and UNC Film Studies, part of the Department of English and Comparative Literature, in connection with Houseguests: American Art from the Art Bridges Collection Loan Partnership.

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Charles Lane, Sidewalk Stories (1989, US) 
 
In this nearly silent homage to Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid (1921), Charles Lane directs and stars in a film about a street artist who unexpectedly becomes the caregiver of a toddler. Set on the streets of lower Manhattan, where Lane’s character is one of many unsheltered people struggling to get by, the film effortlessly blends the gritty realism of 1980s New York with the slapstick sensibilities of films made sixty years earlier.