ROY’S WORLD: BARRY GIFFORD’S CHICAGO (USA, 2020)

DIRECTOR: Rob Christopher

PRODUCERS: Michael Glover Smith & Rob Christopher

STARRING: Lili Taylor, Willem Dafoe, & Matt Dillon

Total Run Time: 75 mins

To be followed by a post-screening conversation with director Rob Christopher moderated by Grace K. Schuler.

Gifford’s “Roy stories”, an autobiographical cycle of interlocking tales written over a period of more than forty years, serves as the foundation of ROY'S WORLD: BARRY GIFFORD'S CHICAGO. Roy, a kid coming of age largely on the gritty streets of 1950s Chicago, is essentially a fictional version of Gifford, tracing his childhood from around the age of five through his teenage years. Through this surrogate, the reader/viewer experiences a slice of Chicago history, from its pervasive municipal corruption, typified in the rise to power of Mayor Richard J. Daley, to the dawn of the tumultuous 60s.

In ROY'S WORLD, excerpts from the “Roy stories,” performed by Willem Dafoe, Matt Dillon, and Lili Taylor, are interwoven with Gifford’s recollections of his childhood in the Second City. Fusing archival materials with animated sequences and an evocative jazz score, ROY’S WORLD presents an impressionistic portrait of a vanished world.

The author of more than forty works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry which have been translated into more than thirty languages, Barry Gifford writes distinctly American stories for readers around the globe. He has been honored with numerous awards, ranging from Italy's Premio Brancati to recognition by the Writers Guild of America and the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. From screenplays (including LOST HIGHWAY, co-written with David Lynch, and CITY OF GHOSTS, a collaboration with Matt Dillon), poetry, and librettos to his acclaimed Sailor and Lula novels (a series which began with WILD AT HEART), Gifford’s writing is as distinctive as it is difficult to classify. Born in Chicago in 1946, the son of a former Texas beauty queen and a father involved with organized crime, Gifford also spent time in Havana, Key West, and New Orleans while growing up. This varied geography proved significant: throughout his career, Gifford’s fiction is born of the clash between what he has referred to as his “Northern Side” and “Southern Side.”

“I realized what I was doing, especially in writing the Roy stories, was writing a kind of a literary history.” says Gifford, in voiceover from the documentary. “A friend of mine whom I'd gone to high school with, he said, ‘You know, you're really writing history here. Not necessarily just your life or your observations but, you know, thinking about the history of a place and people and language.’”