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Free Film Screenings from Film Education

Throughout March 2007

Film Education have free screenings for schools and home educators throughout March, including A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, Freedom Writers, The Lives of Others, Days of Glory and Mischief Nights.

Screenings

A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints
Cert 15, 103mins

Dito Montiel’s directorial debut A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints is a powerful coming-of-age story based on Dito’s own experiences growing up in a tough neighbourhood in New York in 1986. This is the story of how a young man’s hunger for experience and individuality cuts against his loyalty to friends and kin. It’s about coming to terms with misplaced love, reconciling with family, and embracing the ghosts of your past.

Freedom Writers
Cert 12a, 115mins

Inspired by a true story and the diaries of real Long Beach teenagers after the L.A. riots, two time Academy Award® winner Hilary Swank stars as Erin Gruwell, whose passion to become a teacher is soon challenged by a group of Black, Latino and Asian gang bangers who hate her even more than each other. When Erin begins to listen to them, she begins to understand that for these kids, getting through the day alive is enough — they are not delinquents but teenagers fighting "a war of the streets" that began long before they were born. Erin gives them something they never had from a teacher before - respect. She uses the Holocaust to teach them about tolerance and specifically The Diary of Anne Frank to get them to relate this to their own lives. For the first time, these teens experience a hope that maybe they might show the world that their lives matter and they have something to say...

Some screenings will be accompanied by a 5 minute introduction and 30 minute talk after the screening from a representative of The Anne Frank Trust UK.

The Lives of Others
Das Leben der Anderen
Cert 15, 137mins

Set in the 1980s, just prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, this story examines the repressive life of observation in the former East Germany by the secret police, known as the Stasi. Part complex political thriller and part love story the action centres on a couple, a director and actress, who with their intellectual friends are secretly part of the underground. When the Minister of Culture and then a secret service agent get involved with the actress things get complicated and a love triangle ensues with disastrous consequences.

Some screenings will be accompanied by a 15 minute introduction.

Days of Glory
Indigenes
Cert 12a, 120mins

Set in 1943. They had never set foot on French soil, but because France was at war, four young Algerian men, Said, Abdelkader, Messaoud and Yassir, enlisted in the French army along with 130,000 other 'indigenous soldiers', to liberate the 'fatherland' from the Nazi enemy. Days of Glory chronicles the story of these forgotten heroes, the injustices they faced at the time of war, and the discrimination they have subsequently encountered from the French authorities. After seeing the film, French President Jacques Chirac agreed to restore veterans' pensions to the North Africans who fought alongside French troops during the war.

London screening will be followed by a discussion involving the Imperial War Museum and the British Gurkha Welfare Society.

Mischief Nights
Cert 15 [TBC], 93mins

Crime is central to Penny Woolcock's ambitious Mischief Nights, an updating of East Is East, about the British-Asian community, from 1971 to the present, and set on the other side of the Pennines in Leeds.

Followed by a 45 mins discussion by actress Kelli Hollis.

External links