The timing of Los Angeles filmmaker Brooke Keesling’s breast reduction couldn’t have been better. Done before she started her master’s degree in animation in 1997, it was the perfect topic for her thesis film, “Boobie Girl,” one of six short films by and about women being shown Friday in Chicago, the last stop of the nationwide LunaFest film festival.
More than 160 films, ranging from serious to offbeat, were submitted to Luna, maker of nutrition bars for women. Another of the six picked was “Janey Van Winkle,” a modern-day version of Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” by Casey Suchan, a native of west suburban Riverside.
“It’s the story of a woman who sleeps through her engagement, marriage and even the birth of her triplets,” explains Suchan, who is based in Los Angeles but made the film in Riverside with Chicago talent. “At some point in all of our lives, some sooner than others, I think we find ourselves somewhere unexpected and aren’t quite sure how we got there.
“I’d like the audience to laugh, say that could never happen–sleeping through work, sex and life–and then realize that it happens every day, to women and men.”
“Boobie Girl,” which won both an Emmy and an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences award for best student animation, is a humorous short based on Keesling’s experience with large breasts and her eventual breast reduction. The character in the film–who is voiced by June Foray, the woman who did “Rocky the Flying Squirrel” in the cartoon Rocky and Bullwinkle–yearns for big breasts but then learns to be careful what she wishes for.
The other films are: “Dear Judge,” a documentary about an Alabama woman sentenced to prison for a crime she didn’t commit, and her children’s fight to both free her and live their lives without her (she was eventually pardoned by President Clinton as he left office); “Psalm 51,” a three-minute dance and music piece based on the Old Testament passage that addresses sin, hope, despair and forgiveness; “Personal Touch,” a short, serious piece on breast cancer set to hip-hop music and based on the filmmaker’s experience with the disease; and “Grrlyshow,” a 1950s-style film about women who have started their own small, alternative publications called grrly zines.
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LunaFest is at 7 p.m. at the DePaul University Lincoln Park Student Center. Tickets, which are $5 for students and $7 for the general public, are available at the door, or at www.lunabar.com. All net proceeds benefit The Breast Cancer Fund.
