A Guggenheim Fellowship awarded to director Nearing

Producer / director Daniel Nearing

A Guggenheim Fellowship, perhaps the most prestigious award in the world for creative endeavor, was officially awarded Wednesday to filmmaker Daniel Nearing of 9.23 Films. 

Nearing said he received a phone call yesterday from the board of trustees from the New York-based Guggenheim Foundation informing him of his award.  He will receive his $52,000 check on May 1. “That’s five times the amount I spent on the budget of ‘Hogtown,’” he says.

The “no strings attached” artist grant will support Nearing in the production of a third film in his trilogy of character-driven, black-and-white “periodless” features set in Chicago.

Nearing’s first film in the trilogy was “Chicago Heights,” adapted from Sherwood Anderson’s novel “Winesburg, Ohio,” and set in the Chicago exurb.  It was named to Roger Ebert’s list of Best Art Films of 2010. 

The Nearing-directed 2014 “Hogtown,” shot on a nanon budget and set in circa 1919 Chicago, was called “the most original film made in Chicago about Chicago to date,” by the Sun-Times’ Bill Stamets.

While he has not identified what the grant-provided third film will be, “it will be something I am thoroughly invested in,” he says.  It might be “The Peerless Film Manufacturing Company,” about Chicago’s biggest and most successful film studio, which became Essanay Studios, of the 1900s, when Chicago was the world center of film production.

Nearing’s other feature possibility is “Petit Monde,” drama that is set in artistically flowering of turn-of-the-century 1900s Paris and would be filmed there.

About Nearing’s filming potential, The Tribune’s Michael Phillips said that “if he chooses, this Canadian-born, Chicago-based filmmaker could very well become a significant and lasting talent.” 

“I am very grateful also for the critics’ support of my work,” Nearing says.

His Email is daniel.nearing@923films.com.