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Director Lets South Siders Take Him Literally Anywhere for Documentary

By Sam Cholke | July 23, 2015 5:35am
Takin Place Trailer
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Cyrus Dowlatshani

HYDE PARK — A documentary filmmaker has let South Siders take him wherever they wanted to go, and now he’s ready to show what he’s seen.

Since June 2011, director Cyrus Dowlatshahi has let people in Woodlawn, Englewood, Washington Park and other parts of the South Side lead him deep into their neighborhoods.

At 8:30 p.m. on Aug. 21 at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St., Dowlatshahi will show “Takin’ Place,” which collects the renegade fireworks shows, back rooms of fast food joints and backyard barbecues he filmed.

“I organically met people and went with them wherever they would go,” Dowlatshahi said Wednesday.

In the film, Dowlatshahi talks his way behind the bulletproof glass at Pete’s Italian Beef, 7352 S. Halsted St., where he meets Tammy, who tells him about dealing with people constantly asking to borrow money. She takes him along to her hair appointment, where he gets instructions about the benefits of safeguarding your money in your bra.

There he also meets a Jamaican jerk food truck driver, who ferries him around, and these connections continue weaving Dowlatshahi and his film through the many neighborhoods of the South Side.

“You find community there you don’t find in other places,” Dowlatshahi said. “It is really the opposite of what we’re led to believe.”

He said the experience was similar to visiting Iran, where his parents fled after the revolution in 1979 to resettle in Hyde Park.

Dowlatshahi said in both places he’s found communities far more open, welcoming and generous than is depicted by those outside the neighborhood.

Even growing up Hyde Park, Dowlatshahi said he was told that violence defines the neighborhoods west of Cottage Grove Avenue and south of 63rd Street.

“Takin’ Place” looks beyond the violence, but does not deny it is part of life on the South Side.

Dowlatshahi includes footage he shot at a Fourth of July barbecue in Englewood in 2013 when people start shooting in the street directly in front of him as he and the other people at the barbecue run inside a house.

“That was scary,” Dowlatshahi said. “But we went back outside and started lighting off fireworks — I was pretty shocked how normal it was for some people.”

“Takin’ Place” is playing as part of the Black Harvest Film Festival at the Siskel Film Center and will get a second showing at 8:15 p.m. on Aug. 27.

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