Social Justice Film Course Schedule

Here's the lineup of films we'll be seeing. It promises to be a lively and thought-provoking next five weeks!

Contemporary World Problems:
A Passion for Social Justice Examining Issues
Through Popular Culture Films

Class 1 – February 23 Come See the Paradise

This fact-based 1990 film directed by Alan Parker, stars Dennis Quaid and Tamlyn Tomita. Set before and during World War II, the film depicts the treatment of U.S. citizens of Japanese descent following the attack on Pearl Harbor, and their loss of civil liberties within the framework of a love story.

Class 2 – March 2 Inherit the Wind

This classic about the Scopes Monkey Trial, a galvanizing legal drama of the 1920’s, was made into a movie in the 1960’s with Spencer Tracy, Frederic March and Gene Kelly. We’ll discuss how the battle between science and religion continues to raise questions of intellectual freedom today.

Class 3 – March 9 Something the Lord Made

The emotional true story of two men who defied the rules of their time to launch a medical revolution, set against the backdrop of the Jim Crow south in the 1940’s. The two men, Dr. Alfred Blalock (Alan Rickman) and African-American lab technician Vivien Thomas (Mos Def), develop a new technique for helping babies with heart problems.

Class 4 – March 16 Bread and Roses

A young Mexican woman crosses the border into LA to join her sister, who works as a janitor in some of the city's largest corporate offices. Surrounded by the machinations of big business, the sisters seek happiness on a smaller but more human scale as they try to organize a janitorial union. By British director Ken Loach, starring Adrien Brody, Pilar Padilla.

Class 5 – March 23 - Le Placard (The Closet)

A 2001 French comedy film written and directed by Francis Veber. An ordinary man’s life takes on surprisingly new dimensions when he pretends to be gay in order to keep his job at a condom factory. This amusing film takes on bourgeois prejudices which are timely, as evidenced by California’s Proposition 8. French, w/English subtitles.