This poetic masterpiece serves as the crowning testament of Joris Ivens, the great Dutch documentarist and leftist who made this film in collaboration with his companion Marceline Loridan shortly before his death at the age of 90. Neither a documentary nor a fantasy but a sublime fusion of the two, the film deals in multiple ways with the wind, with Ivens’s asthma, with China, with the 20th century (and, more implicitly, with the 19th and the 21st), with magic, and with the cinema. Ivens was born only two years after Georges Melies screened his first work, and part of this film’s imaginative, freewheeling, and often comic agenda is to reflect on film history, political history, and personal history that fact, as well as on the near century of intertwining made up Ivens’s life. For all its cosmic dimensions, this work is funny and lighthearted rather than pretentious and ponderous. It may even give you some renewed faith in life on this planet (1988). (Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Thursday, May 28, 6:00, 443-3737)