Local filmmaker and Northwestern professor Kyle Henry’s Rogers Park captures the life, diversity, and flavor of the northside Chicago neighborhood in its story of two couples as they attempt to keep their relationships afloat. Henry and screenwriter Carlos Treviño craft a film that is both universal in its characters’ raw and authentic emotional lives and a specific and rich portrait of a little-seen corner of the city.
To kick off the Block Cinema Fall 2018 season Henry , Trevino and actress Sara Sevigny discuss the unique process of production and inspiration behind the film.
From The Chicago Tribune
Even if you’ve never set foot in the neighborhood or even heard of it, “Rogers Park” the movie has such a comfortably “lived-in” feel, such an authentic vibe, you’ll feel as if you’re eavesdropping on the complicated and messy and sometimes heartbreaking and occasionally mildly absurd lives of the deeply flawed but mostly sympathetic early middle-aged characters at the center of the story.
Director Kyle Henry, screenwriter Carlos Treviño and a wonderfully talented ensemble cast deliver a 21st century relationship time capsule of Rogers Park and some of the people who call it home — but this tightly scripted, dialogue-driven character study is also brimming with universal truths about the long-hidden but nevertheless permanent bruises of family tragedies, the changing and sometimes numbing nature of even a truly loving long-term relationship and the slow death of knowing one’s dreams are almost certainly defunct.
