CHICAGO — The new Steve James documentary “A Compassionate Spy,” about the Manhattan Project physicist, Soviet spy and University of Chicago alum Theodore Hall, has been selected for the documentary slate of the 79th Venice Film Festival.
The world premiere screening is Sept. 2.
It’s James’ first-ever appearance at one of the most prestigious and influential international festivals. Though the filmmaker could not confirm the near-future for his latest project, many world premieres start at Venice and then go straight to a U.S. premiere at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado a few days later.
As with most of his festival-bound work, the Oak Park-based filmmaker said Wednesday, he’s scrambling to meet the submission deadline for the Sundance festival in January. “A Compassionate Spy” worked on a different timeline; James wrapped up principal photography in April, and his producers at Participant Media suggested submitting the film for Venice (Aug. 31-Sept. 10) and Telluride (Sept. 2-5).
Unlike his locally-based Participant Media-backed projects, the 10-episode portrait of Oak Park and River Forest High School “America to Me” and the five-part Chicago mayoral race mosaic “City So Real,” “A Compassionate Spy” runs about 100 minutes.
“Every once in a while I try to do something short,” James said.
“A Compassionate Spy” deals with the lives of Ted and Joan Hall — their marriage, their longtime evasion of the FBI and the information about Hall’s atomic espionage activities that came to light four years before Hall died in Cambridge, England, in 1999. His widow survives, and after James traveled to Cambridge to meet with her, and others, he knew he had a movie.
Hall, according to his obituary in The New York Times, graduated from Harvard at age 18, a physicist on the rise. He was the youngest scientist recruited during World War II to work on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico.
Convinced that America’s lead in the race to build an atomic bomb would destabilize the world and hasten all-out nuclear warfare, Hall began passing secrets to the Soviets. Two Los Alamos employees eventually were convicted as Soviet agents; rumors of a third persisted, but Hall evaded charges.
After the war, Hall attended the University of Chicago and finished out his Master’s and doctoral degrees in physics. He worked in biophysics in New York City and then moved with his family to England.
This is new territory for James and his longtime creative home Kartemquin Films, which is producing along with Participant Media. “A Compassionate Spy” required the filmmaker to venture into the visual realm of historical re-creation, using actors to portray the Halls in their post-WWII UChicago years.
“Those scenes are a crucial part of the story,” he said. For the re-creation footage, James and crew filmed for six days in a North Side Chicago bungalow, the Dominican College library and downtown Chicago.
The film is one of two Participant-backed documentaries premiering at Venice. The other, “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” comes from Oscar-winning director Laura Poitras (”Citizenfour”) and examines photographer Nan Goldin’s fight against the Big Pharma Sackler family. That documentary screens in competition with 21 other narrative and nonfiction titles for the Golden Lion award. “A Compassionate Spy” is screening out of competition.
The festival opens Aug. 31 with director Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of the Don DeLillo novel “White Noise,” starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig.
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