Chicago South Side Film Festival pivots to online with documentary on predatory contract home sales

The folks at the Chicago South Side Film Festival are aware that the show — no matter how it is presented — must go on.

In that spirit, the festival, which will be rebooted as an online event via Seed & Spark, a filmmaker crowdfunding website, plans to launch its 2020 slate by hosting a July 19 screening of the documentary “The Color Tax: Origins of the Modern-Day Racial Wealth Gap” at 6 p.m.

The festival, in its entirety, is scheduled to take place Sept. 25 to Oct. 4.

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The film, which the CSSFF has screened previously, is the first in a docuseries by filmmaker Bruce Orenstein called “The Shame of Chicago,” which tells the story of how predatory contract home sales were thrust upon Black families who were unable to secure the types of mortgages white, would-be homeowners received.

White contract sellers who were real estate speculators would frighten white residents with stories of Black homeownership. These folks wound up selling their homes and the speculators would double the price for Black people who wanted to move in.

This practice was the catalyst for creating the wealth gap between Black and white Chicagoans which continues to widen over the decades.

“What it [the film] does is give a very detailed account of all of the social and policy and economic forces that basically created urban segregation in America,” said Michelle Kennedy, CSSFF’s founder. “This is really the only way that black people could buy a home; they really didn’t have any equity, so it wasn’t homeownership per se, it was something it was like an evil hybrid between renting and ownership.”

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Viewers of the first film can reserve free tickets at Seed & Spark’s website.

Following the film, Kennedy is scheduled to moderate a live panel with Orenstein and Folded Map Project creator/photographer Tonika Johnson.

“Before COVID [-19] came along, we were probably going to have our best year ever in terms of the level of sponsorship and the number of films,” said Kennedy. “But we still want to (a) be active and pursue our mission, which is to provide opportunities for South Side filmmakers to screen work in their own communities, and (b) use film as a tool for collective community and intellectual engagement.

“But as this coronavirus crisis evolved and it became clear that people could not safely gather in theaters, Seed & Spark created this idea of an online film festival. And so what it means is that our festival will get a website and people can pay not much money — between $7 to $10 more than likely — to see a movie online and then after the movie do a Zoom-like call for discussion of that film with the filmmakers. So you get everything but the popcorn.”