The 61st edition of the Chicago International Film Festival begins Wednesday night, with the world premiere of a documentary of the Jackie Robinson West Little League team that won the U.S. championship in 2014.

"One Golden Summer" premieres at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave., and director Kevin Shaw will be in attendance.

Jackie Robinson West won the national championship title in the 2014 Little League World Series. A pep rally featuring Cubs and White Sox higher-ups was held at Millennium Park, and the team went to Washington to visit then-President Barack Obama at the White House.

But the following year, rival Evergreen Park Little League vice president Chris Janes accused Jackie Robinson West of allowing ineligible players, who lived outside the team's designated boundaries, to play on the team. Little League International ruled JRW did break residential boundary rules, and the team was stripped of its championship title.

The documentary looks back at the stories of the 13 12-year-old athletes from Chicago's South Side who became media superstars as part of the first all-Black team to win the U.S. Little League championship, only to see their fame rapidly slip away.

Shaw said the time had come to revisit the triumphs and controversy of JRW with the players having grown up.

"I think it was always a question of, you know, what happened to these guys after so many years? At 12 and 13 years old, they're at a certain level where they're not really able to understand maybe what had happened with that whirlwind of all that celebrity and that really chaos that went on with the controversy in terms of the stripping of the title," Shaw said, "and so we needed some time for them to mature, to think about what had occurred and be able to really speak upon it."

Shaw noted that with all the coverage of JRW's victory and the subsequent controversy, there was not really a whole of attention directed at the players. "One Golden Summer" gives the players an opportunity to tell the story from their own points of view, he said.

DJ Butler was one a player on the JRW team. He emphasized how much playing with the team meant to his personal development.

"It was an experience that was kind of like none other, like nothing I could really like put into mind — just going from like that all the time like celebrity type of feeling, and not knowing really how big we were because we were young, and just kind of having fun, and just living our regular lives," Butler said, "and then just forcing ourselves to grow up really at an early age, how to be mentally tough and stable, because we still had to go be able to go to school and to chase our dreams on the field as well."

"One Golden Summer" also features conversations with reporters, coaches, and parents at it deals with issues of race, power, and money in youth sports.

The film festival features a total of 114 films and 70 shorts. At 10 p.m. Wednesday at the Music Box, the popular Chainsaw Man of anime fame makes his way onto the screen for the first time in the action-packed adventure "Chainsaw Man — The Movie: Reze Arc," directed by Tatsuya Yoshihara. The film is in Japanese with English subtitles.

Highlights on Thursday include Frédéric Hambalek's "What Marielle Knows" — the story of an 11-year-old girl who gets slapped in the schoolyard develops telepathic powers to see everything her parents do, whether she's in the room or not. "What Marielle Knows" can be seen at the AMC NEWCITY 14, 1500 N. Clybourn Ave., at 2 p.m. Thursday. The film is in German and French with subtitles.

Director Mona Fastvold will be at the Music Box at 3 p.m. Thursday for the screening of her film "The Testament of Ann Lee" — a retelling of the story of the Shaker religious sect.

Producer Lance Kramer will be in attendance for screenings at 5 p.m. Friday and noon Saturday of the documentary "Holding Liat." Liat Beinin Atzili and her husband, Aviv, were taken hostage by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, and tensions rose at Liat's American Israeli parents tried to get their daughter back. "Holding Liat" is also showing at the AMC NEWCITY 14.

Those are but three of the 14 films appearing on Saturday alone.

Meanwhile, the Criterion Mobile Closet will be coming to the festival during opening weekend Friday through Sunday. The Criterion Mobile Closet is a replica of the original Criterion Closet in New York.

is stocked with more than 1,700 of the world's greatest films — with every in-print edition from the Criterion Collection, as well as all in-print releases from Criterion's Eclipse and Janus Contemporaries lines.

The Criterion Mobile Closet will be set up at the NEWCITY Lincoln Park mall, which includes the AMC NEWCITY 14, on the former site of the New City YMCA on Halsted Street south of North Avenue.

The closet will be open to the public on a first-come, first-serve basis between 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. Friday, and 11 a.m. and 7 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Lines will form at 1:30 p.m. Thursday and 9:30 a.m. Saturday and Sunday. No purchase is required, but visitors can buy up to three items with a 40% Mobile Closet discount, in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Criterion Collection.

The Chicago International Film Festival is on through Sunday, Oct. 26. In addition n to the Music Box and the AMC NEWCITY 14, screenings will also be held at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.; the Chicago History Museum, 1601 N. Clark St.; the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago, 915 E. 60th St.; Kennedy-King College, 6301 S. Halsted St.; and the National Museum of Mexican Art, 1852 W. 19th St.