CHICAGO — Halfway through coffee with Emily Long, the new executive director of the Gene Siskel Film Center, we had a little linguistic misunderstanding. She mentioned an upcoming September Film Center retrospective of banned films, curated by the center’s programming director Rebecca Fons; I heard the word “band,” not “banned,” which led to a minute or two of crossed wires and suspicions (mine) of a slight stroke (false alarm) before we sorted it out.
Raised mostly in the Chicago suburbs, Long succeeded longtime Film Center executive director Jean de St. Aubin in May. “I’ve always wanted to run a theater,” she told me.
The Film Center, working under the auspices of the School of the Art Institute, has long been part of SAIC, although its two-venue facility on State Street has a way of feeling a fair distance from the rest of the SAIC buildings. Long and I talked about that relationship between the Film Center and its educational umbrella — and why, among other things, she’s heartened by the surprise success of the Film Center’s early 2023 “Settle In” series, spanning the hypnotic 7.5-hour Béla Tarr ruminator “Sátántangó” to Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 10-hour “Dekalog.”
