Film Studies Series

DePauw's Film Studies Series screens a series of thought-provoking, critically acclaimed films throughout the academic year. The spring season includes:

A SCREAMING MAN (2010) 

Monday, February 20, 7:30 p.m. - Ashley Square Cinemas 

Winner of the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, this film from the republic of Chad follows the decline of Adam (Youssouf Djaoro), a former swimming champion whose whole life revolves around the upscale hotel swimming pool where he has been working as an attendant for over thirty years. When new management demotes him to a guard position and hands his old job over to his twenty-year-old son, Abdel, he is upset and humiliated. Outside of work, a community leader exerts intense pressure on him to contribute to the government’s ongoing war effort against rebel forces. Practically penniless, the only thing he has to offer is his son. As neighbors all around him begin to flee the country, Adam confronts the reality of war and the consequences of his actions. 

45365 (2010) 

Monday, March 12, 7:30 p.m. - Ashley Square Cinemas 

’45365,’ is a portrait of Sidney, a modest, ordinary small town in Ohio. It also happens to be where ’45365′ directors, Bill and Turner Ross, grew up. But the film’s approach to exploring Sidney is anything but ordinary. Instead of focusing on one or a handful of people, the film approaches Sidney in a more democratic manner, following a wide variety of town dwellers, giving each of them more or less equal weight. There are no central characters in ’45365′; the town—its people and traditions—functions as a collective central character. 

OF GODS AND MEN (2010) 

Monday, April 9, 7:30 p.m. - Ashley Square Cinemas 

Eight French Christian monks live in harmony with their Muslim brothers in a monastery perched in the mountains of North Africa in the 1990s. When a crew of foreign workers is massacred by an Islamic fundamentalist group, fear sweeps though the region. The army offers them protection, but the monks refuse. Should they leave? Despite the growing menace in their midst, they slowly realize that they have no choice but to stay... come what may. This film is loosely based on the life of the Cistercian monks of Tibhirine in Algeria, from 1993 until their kidnapping in 1996. 

MEET JOHN DOE (1941) 

Monday, April 23, 7:30 p.m. - Ashley Square Cinemas 

The film tells the story of a feisty newspaperwoman (Barbara Stanwyck) about to lose her job in a wave of cost-saving moves at the newspaper. To prove her worth, she invents the story of an “everyman” (played by Gary Cooper) who threatens to commit suicide on Christmas Eve out of disgust with corrupt politics and the hopeless plight of the poor. The newspaper's circulation soars, and a reform movement is born. Meet John Doe is the classic third film in Frank Capra’s unofficial trilogy about the common man and American individualism in the face of the rising tide of fascism in the 1930s and 1940s.