The Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago has canceled two screenings of Senator Obama Goes to Africa, a documentary by Bob Hercules & Keith Walker about the presidential candidate’s “emotional homecoming to Kisumu, Kenya - his father’s former home.” Even though the film is already available on DVD, with interest in the Illinois senator higher than ever (despite or because of his marginal loss to Hillary Clinton last night, “Obama” is today’s Top 3 search term on Technorati, and “Barack Obama” is #2 on Yahoo), you can be sure the Film Center wasn’t going to have trouble selling tickets. So what’s the problem?

According to this Chicagoist story, as a non-profit the Film Center couldn’t risk “creat[ing] a perceived aura of support for any political candidate.” More than that, screening a pro-Obama film during an election could actually “jeopardize [the center's] not for profit status.”

Would the better solution be to run films representing each of the candidates? I mean, sure, maybe you wait until later in the season, when the race is down to just a couple of frontrunners in each party. But it shouldn’t be hard finding material.

If McCain continues to make good on his New Hampshire surge, programming films that glorify the Republican side of the ticket should not be a problem. McCain was featured prominently in Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight; he also appeared in Return With Honor, a doc about Vietnam POWs co-directed by Freida Lee Mock and narrated by Tom Hanks. And of course, there’s always McCain’s cameo in Wedding Crashers. If McCain drops out, things’ll get a little bit trickier, although Mike Huckabee did appear in something called Action Hero Makeover, which is apparently a documentary about gastric bypass surgery.

But you have to imagine that the easiest candidate to program screenings around would be Obama’s stiffest (pun intended) competitor. Hillary Clinton has a whopping 82 titles on her IMDb profile, including Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s doc on the 92 Clinton campaign, The War Room. The clip above, the only I could find on YouTube with Mrs. Clinton in it, is a better argument for Gore nostalgia than anything else. But barring that, there’s always such obvious classics as White House Christmas Memories. And, of course, Sicko. But screening that would probably put the Film Center right back in the Obama favoritism zone.

[via GreenCine Daily]