Vincent film takes Best Documentary at Kansas film festival

September 29, 2009 – The documentary about Marina City resident Vincent Falk was awarded “Best Documentary” at a film festival in Kansas this week.

Vincent: A Life In Color is a 95-minute documentary about the man who dresses in brightly colored suits and dances on Chicago River bridges for the amusement of tour boats. Many people are surprised to learn Falk has worked as a computer programmer for Cook County for more than 20 years. He has owned a condo unit at Marina City for 11 years.

The film was shown on September 19 at the 2009 Kansas International Film Festival in Overland Park, Kansas. Jennifer Burns, who produced and directed the film, says there were 13 documentaries competing for the award that was announced on Monday.

“The audience was really engaged and asked a lot of great questions,” she recalls of the screening early on a Saturday afternoon. “We even had one gentleman who called Vincent ‘the shaman of Chicago,’” referring to a priest who uses magic.

Robert Butler, a film critic for the Kansas City Star, included the film in a list of “10 to watch” at the film festival near Kansas City. Wrote Butler in his September 16 column, “If you’ve taken one of those Chicago boat tours you may have seen Vincent P. Falk perched on a bridge in a brightly colored suit, waving like a crazy man and doing a little dance move. Who is this so-called ‘Fashion Man?’ Nutcase? Performance artist? Jennifer Burns’s lovely doc digs into Vincent’s life to find an orphan raised by the state who takes childlike glee in dressing up in outlandish business suits.”

In another column, Butler calls the film “charming.”

Burns says the film will be screened next month at the Bend Film Festival in Bend, Oregon, and the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival in Hot Springs, Arkansas. It will also run for a week back at the Glenwood Arts Theater in Overland Park, host of the recent Kansas film festival, beginning on Friday.

Jennifer Burns and Vincent Falk

(Above) Jennifer Burns (left) and Vincent Falk at the 2009 Kansas International Film Festival on September 19.