The Grand Illusion Pop Up and "Christiane F."

Last week I had the opportunity to see two things that I was very curious about. Let's start with the first one: the Grand Illusion Pop Ups.

For many years now, a group of movie enthusiasts has kept a small movie theater that they named the Grand Illusion Cinema. It was located in a former dentist office in the University District and it was really well put together and manned by volunteers. It had good image and good sound, and it was truly a work of love by people who always wanted to watch all kinds of movies on a bigger screen. As such, it used to show a number of interesting movies from the past, the more obscure the better, and you could watch on a theater screen some particular movie that you had always been curious about. Even better, it partnered with the legendary Scarecrow video rental store to show movies that are actually not available in any media anymore: on occasion you could see a movie being played from an old videocassette that was once distributed in that form but since then had disappeared. I had been there a number of times, including when I went to watch Zardoz, which is one of the weirdest movies ever made.

Alas, all good things come to an end. With Seattle real estate prices going crazy, new buildings are popping up everywhere. Eventually, the owner of the house where the Grand Illusion was realized that he could make a ton of money by selling the land to some developer, so he kicked the movie theater out some months ago. The volunteers, though, were undeterred: they are now looking for a new location somewhere in Seattle. In the mean time, they are taking advantage of the various small movie venues in the city to show the movies that the Grand Illusion would normally show.

That was the case on Monday of last week. The Northwest Film Forum is a small non-commercial movie theater in Capitol Hill, and the Grand Illusion crew asked if they could show a movie on Monday night, when normally the theater is not open anyway, and the organizers of the Forum kindly accepted. Besides the NWFF, other small venues in Seattle, like the After Hours at the Crocodile, the Seattle International Film Festival Film Center and others, have made their movie theaters available to them, which is quite nice, and those screenings are called "Grand Illusion Pop Ups", so that the Grand Illusion can keep going until it finds a new home.

And that brings us to the second thing I was very curious about. This one, in fact, goes all the way back to when I was a tiny little kid in Brazil, when this was still something quite famous the world over. Back in the 1970's, unfortunately, there was an epidemic of drug usage among the German youth, particularly in then West Berlin. In 1977 two German journalists published a shocking book named (in English) "Christiane F.", in which they tell the real story of a girl in West Berlin that at 14 years old was already addicted to heroin and had to prostitute herself at the (infamous) Berlin Zoo train station in order to buy drugs. It was a brutal book that eventually was made into a movie in 1981, packing even more of a shock since it was shot in the actual locations in Berlin and it showed the graphic images of what Christiane was doing at 14 (and showed her friends too, some of which died horribly). I had always heard that name "Christiane F." and now I could see the full story, and, in all honesty, it is a punch on the stomach of a movie, but a very good one nevertheless. The Grand Illusion Pop Up was showing a digitally restored copy that made very clear what those kids were doing then, without any pulled punches.

I was shaken to see how far those kids, even in a prosperous society such as West Germany, would go because of their addiction. It is a hard movie to find, but, if you have the opportunity to see it, it's definitely worth it, no matter how shocking it is. Since most people won't have that opportunity (and it doesn't spoil the movie since that information is given at the beginning), it is also a story of redemption: Christiane F. managed to quit heroin, and she's now living a much better life in Germany.




Location: Seattle, WA, USA

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