Experience the power of cinema with four of FACETS Founder Milos Stehlik’s favorite arthouse classics. 

 Milos Stehlik devoted his life to film. As the founder and director of FACETS, Milos helped revolutionize film education, exhibition, and distribution for independent, international, and arthouse film. As an educator, a journalist on WBEZ, and vocal champion of film, Milos helped introduce generations to the awesome power of film. With Milos’s passing in July 2019 after a 6-month battle with cancer, we truly lost a film legend.  

 If you knew Milos, then at some point you were most likely impressed by his encyclopedic film knowledge. He had a knack for excitedly recommending the films you never knew about, but that would change your life. In honor of Milos and to celebrate his legacy as a tastemaker and ardent champion of independent film in Chicago and beyond, we present the Milos’s Picks film series with four films Milos thought everyone should see. 

 The series starts with Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963) on Friday, May 6 at 7:00 pm, starring one of Milos’s favorite actors, the sublimely cool Marcello Mastrioanni. Followed by Sergei Parajanov’s banned masterpiece The Color of Pomegranates (1969) on Friday, May 13 at 7:00 pm, which Milos and a group of collaborators helped smuggle from Paris to Chicago for its U.S. Premiere. Then on May 20 at 7:00 pm, Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life (2011), which Milos defended as a masterpiece of contemporary cinema against detractors as a critic on WBEZ’s Worldview. The series ends with a screening of Dušan Makavejev’s controversial WR: Mysteries of an Organism (1969) on Friday, May 27 at 7:00 pm, a film that Milos introduced to critic Roger Ebert at FACETS’ first retrospective of Makavejev’s work in 1975. 

 Each of these films, in their own unique ways, can remind us of Milos’s guiding philosophy for cinema: by properly wielding the power of film, it is possible to, in Milos’s words, “open minds and souls, giving every individual the opportunity to see themselves as they are, and as what they can be, embracing their potential to save our planet and ourselves.”