A riveting yarn about a Copenhagen police officer who moves to a small town and becomes entangled with a married femme fatale.

About Terribly Happy

The official Danish selection for this year’s Academy Awards and winner of seven Robert Awards (Danish Oscars) — including Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay

Terribly Happy follows Robert Hanson (Jakob Cedergren), an officer who, following a nervous breakdown, is transferred to a provincial town to take on the mysteriously vacated marshal position. Robert’s big city temperament makes it impossible for him to fit in, or understand the uncivilized, bizarre behavior displayed by the townspeople.

Quickly spiraling into an intense fable, this film by director Henrik Ruben Genz displays a unique and sometimes macabre vision of the darkest depths to which people will go to achieve a sense of security and belonging.

Opens at select Los Angeles theaters on February 12.

Provided courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories. Not rated. Running time: 102 minutes. In Danish, with English subtitles.

For more information about the film, click here.

About Outside the Box (Office)

Outside the Box (Office) is a weekly showcase for upcoming releases, highlighting world cinema, documentary and independent film titles. Recognizing a need for greater diversity on campus, the series will draw from around the globe to present movies that may challenge, inspire or simply entertain. The weekly screenings will be on Wednesday nights (and other select dates, as they arise) in the School of Cinematic Arts Complex, George Lucas Building.

To view the calendar of screenings, click here.

About Check-In and Reservations

The theater will be overbooked to ensure capacity, and the RSVP list will be honored on a first-come, first-served basis, with no reserved seating. Please bring a photo ID or printout of your reservation confirmation, which will automatically be sent to your email account after you successfully RSVP through the Web site. Doors will open at 6:30 p.m.

Wednesday 02/10/2010: 7:00 PM - 10:00 PM

University Park Campus George Lucas Instructional Building (LUC) Room 112

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Writer/directors Ben Chace and Sam Fleischner give a Q&A and screen their tale of a jilted man adrift in Jamaica.

Max (Sean Bones) lives in Brooklyn. He enjoys playing soccer, skateboarding and drinking with his friends at local bars. Last summer, he and his girlfriend, Willow (Norah Jones), won a free cruise to Jamaica; but two days before the trip, she dumps him cold. When his friends flake, Max winds up alone on the high seas, navigating through crowds of grey-haired cruisers. Over the course of several days, he flirts with the staff photographer, drinks cocktails with the boat’s celebrity juggler, and has several strange encounters with the only other loner (Kevin Bewersdorf).

When the cruise liner docks in Jamaica, Max quickly escapes the tourist zone. At a local jerk stand, he meets a charming Rasta who offers to show him a secret beach. Feeling irie as he lounges on the tropical sand with his new friends, Max loses track of time and his personal belongings. In his pathetic attempt to do something about it, he finds that the cultural divides he thought he could transcend are not so simple. Naked and broke in a foreign country, where he stands out like a sore thumb, Max begins to make his way towards the American Embassy in Kingston. Along the road, Jamaica is waiting to meet him.

For further details and to RSVP, click here.

Wednesday 02/10/2010: 8:45 PM - 11:15 PM

University Park Campus George Lucas Instructional Building (LUC) Room 112

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A film by Taiwanese director Leon Dai, about a poor harbor worker struggling to raise his young daughter alone.

No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti reaches into the grayer shades of contemporary Taiwanese society with its rich story.

Dai’s sharp, emotional second feature is a deeply moving tale of family bonds that resolutely refuse to break. Li Wu-hsiung is a poor single father working high-risk jobs aboard boats in the harbor zone, where he lives in an illegal shack with his young daughter, abandoned at birth by her mother. Father and daughter live happily together until she reaches school age, but when the authorities intervene, it leads to a showdown that becomes a worldwide media event.

Thoughtful and gently paced, this astute drama delivers a tense, riveting narrative that belies its quiet tone. It has won multiple prizes at international festivals, including top honors at the 2009 Taipei Film Festival and Taiwan’s Golden Horse Awards.

Actor-turned-director Leon Dai wrote the screenplay together with lead actor Wen-Pin Chen, drawing on a real incident that occurred in Taiwan in 2003. Dai was inspired by his surprise at how quickly the story was forgotten after being broadcast live throughout Taiwan.

Leon Dai (Dai Li-Ren) is a well-known actor and director in Taiwan. After graduating from the directing course at the National University of the Arts in Taipei, he made the short film Summers (2001), which was selected for competition in Clermont-Ferrand. In 2002, he was invited by Teddy Chen to direct the feature film Twenty Something Taipei, which went on to become the second-highest grossing film of the year in Taiwan. As an actor, Dai has starred in more than 30 films since 1993 and has been awarded several prizes for his work.

35mm print provided courtesy of Atom Cinema. Not rated. Running time: 92 minutes.
In Hakka, Min Nan and Mandarin, with English subtitles.

To view the trailer, click here.

About Outside the Box (Office)

Outside the Box (Office) is a weekly showcase for upcoming releases, highlighting world cinema, documentary and independent film titles. Recognizing a need for greater diversity on campus, the series will draw from around the globe to present movies that may challenge, inspire or simply entertain. The weekly screenings will be on Wednesday nights (and other select dates, as they arise) in the School of Cinematic Arts Complex, George Lucas Building.

To view the calendar of screenings, click here.

About Check-In and Reservations

The theater will be overbooked to ensure capacity, and the RSVP list will be honored on a first-come, first-served basis, with no reserved seating. Please bring a photo ID or printout of your reservation confirmation, which will automatically be sent to your email account after you successfully RSVP through the Web site. Doors will open at 6:30 p.m.

Friday 02/12/2010: 7:00 PM - 10:00 PM

University Park Campus George Lucas Instructional Building (LUC) Room 108

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A riveting documentary examining masculinity, sexism and homophobia in hip-hop culture.

Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes premiered on the Emmy Award-winning PBS series Independent Lens in 2007. Delivering a self-described “loving critique” of rap music, director Byron Hurt — a star quarterback in college, longtime hip-hop fan, and now a gender violence prevention educator — pays tribute to the power and creativity of hip-hop while challenging the rap music industry to take responsibility for glamorizing destructive stereotypes of manhood in general and perpetuating negative myths about African American males in particular.

Critically acclaimed for its fearless engagement with issues of race and racism, gender violence, and the corporate exploitation of youth culture, this prophetic film is as entertaining as it is educational, as bold as the bravado it exposes.

Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, produced and directed by Byron Hurt, is a co-production of God Bless the Child Productions Inc. and the Independent Television Service (ITVS) in association with the National Black Programming Consortium (NBPC). It was executive produced by Stanley Nelson and Sally Jo Fifer, and co-produced and edited by Sabrina Schmidt Gordon.

The LGBT Resource Center and Center for Black Cultural and Student Affairs are proud to sponsor this screening. For more information, email lgbt@usc.edu or visit www.usc.edu/lgbt or www.usc.edu/cbcsa.

Tuesday 02/16/2010: 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM

University Park Campus Doheny Memorial Library (DML) 240

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Food for Thought’s ongoing “Jesus at the Movies” series screens and discusses the 1989 Quebecois film.

Jesus of Montreal will be screened on Wednesday, February 17 and Monday, February 22. On Wednesday, February 24, Father James Heft will lead a discussion based on the film.

After finishing his doctoral studies in historical theology at the University of Toronto, Father Heft spent many years at the University of Dayton, a Catholic university founded by the Marianists. There he served as chair of the Theology Department for six years, provost of the university for eight years, and chancellor for 10 years. He left the University of Dayton in the summer of 2006 to work on the foundation of the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at USC, where he is currently Alton Brooks Professor of Religion, and president of the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies.

Dates: 02/17/2010, 02/22/2010, 02/24/2010: 6:00 PM

University Park Campus United University Church (UMC) Peace Center

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An award-winning doc about the 92nd Buffalo Division, the African American combat unit that fought in Italy during WWII.

This 60-minute feature film recounts a critically important piece of black history and places it squarely within the context of Civil Rights history. The “Buffalo Soldiers” were men who valiantly fought two wars at the same time: one against the Nazis, the other against racial discrimination. Those who survived found that their contributions went unnoticed upon their return to United States.

Director Fred Kuwornu, an Italian filmmaker of African heritage, searches out little known aspects of the story, including details of the friendships forged between African American soldiers and the Italian partisan fighters and villagers they liberated from fascist rule. It was a 2008 meeting with Spike Lee — who was shooting Miracle at St. Anna on location in Tuscany — that inspired Kuwornu to start this very personal voyage of discovery, culminating in the powerful documentary. Vernon Baker, the last living African American soldier awarded the Medal of Honor in World War II, recounts vividly his wartime experiences and the heroism of his unit. The film also includes a special courtesy appearance by President Barack Obama. Inside Buffalo is a patchwork of stories that history almost forgot to tell... until now.

Not rated. Running time: 55 minutes. In English and Italian, with English subtitles.

About Outside the Box (Office)

Outside the Box (Office) is a weekly showcase for upcoming releases, highlighting world cinema, documentary and independent film titles. Recognizing a need for greater diversity on campus, the series will draw from around the globe to present movies that may challenge, inspire or simply entertain. The weekly screenings will be on Wednesday nights (and other select dates, as they arise) in the School of Cinematic Arts Complex, George Lucas Building.

To view the calendar of screenings, click here.

About Check-In and Reservations

The theater will be overbooked to ensure capacity, and the RSVP list will be honored on a first-come, first-served basis, with no reserved seating. Please bring a photo ID or printout of your reservation confirmation, which will automatically be sent to your email account after you successfully RSVP through the Web site. Doors will open at 6:30 p.m.

Wednesday 02/17/2010: 7:00 PM - 10:00 PM

University Park Campus George Lucas Instructional Building (LUC) Room 112

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A look at filmic works from Japan, by some of the most creative and accomplished filmmakers working today.

The resurgence of Japanese cinema in the 1990s dramatically reconfigured the aspirations, practices and reception of one of the largest and most continuous film cultures outside of the United States. This three-day event features films by three contemporary Japanese filmmakers whose work has crossed national borders and been viewed outside of Japan, elsewhere, in the world.

In the wake of the classical cinemas of the 1930 and ’40s, the colonial cinemas of the period, and the New Wave cinemas of the 1950s and ’60s, the Japanese cinema of the late 20th and early 21st centuries has entered into the world and been received internationally in unprecedented ways.

“Contemporary Japanese Cinema: Outside, Elsewhere, In the World” features the work of some of Japan’s most active filmmakers of the new generation — Shinji Aoyama, Shunji Iwai and Ryuhei Kitamura — as well as commentary by one of Japan’s most active film scholars and critics, the widely published Keisuke Kitano, who completed his graduate studies in the United States.

In different ways, each filmmaker has established complex relations to the national cinema of Japan, while also moving outside of national confines. Aoyama, also an acclaimed novelist, is the internationally renowned director of Eureka (2000) and Sad Vacation (2007), both of which will be screened in this festival. Iwai, who began his career as a visual artist and a maker of music videos, has enjoyed tremendous popularity throughout Asia, in his native Japan as well as in South Korea, China and Taiwan. Among Iwai’s remarkable films are Love Letter (1995) and his dark reflection on adolescence, All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001). Kitamura, who also began his career as a visual artist, studied in Australia before becoming a prominent member of the film industries of both Japan and Hollywood with films such as Godzilla: Final Wars (2004) and an adaptation of Clive Barker’s Midnight Meat Train (2008). Iwai and Kitamura now reside in the United States, where they work across genres, languages and cultures.

Festival screenings include Shunji Iwai’s eccentric comedy Hana and Alice (Hana to Arisu, 2004); Baton (2009), a short animated feature written by Iwai and directed by Ryuhei Kitamura; Air Doll (Kûki Ningyô, 2009), the most recent film by Hirokazu Kore-eda, the director of After Life and Nobody Knows; Kitamura’s female-ninja thriller, Azumi (2003), which is based on a manga; and two grippingly meditative dramas by Shinji Aoyama, Eureka (2000) and Sad Vacation (2007).

Keisuke Kitano, one of Japan’s most energetic new film critics and scholars, will offer illuminating commentary throughout the festival. Kitano is a professor of film and media studies at the School of Image Arts and Sciences at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan, where he also serves as associate dean. Joining the discussion of Kore-eda’s Air Doll will be Youngmin Choe, a professor of East Asian languages and cultures at USC who specializes in Korean film and transnational visual cultures.

For a full schedule of events, click here.

Organized by the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Programmed by Akira Mizuta Lippit, professor and chair of critical studies in the School of Cinematic Arts; and co-directed by Nicky Schildkraut, poet and Ph.D. candidate in literature and creative writing at USC. Reception hosted by the East Asian Studies Center.

Daily: Friday 02/19/2010 - Sunday 02/21/2010; All day

University Park Campus Eileen Norris Cinema Theatre Frank Sinatra Hall

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The Southern California Business Film Festival celebrates the work of top collegiate filmmakers.

The current economic climate has nurtured conversations about the ways in which financial decisions shape the world we live in, from the steps of Capitol Hill to the dorm rooms of college students nationwide. As those conversations spark artistic creations, the Southern California Business Film Festival (SCBFF) seeks to provide a forum for and celebration of the role of financial decisions and the powerfully evocative medium of film.  

With a week of panel discussions, lectures, networking events, and a student film competition offering up to $20,000 in prizes, the third annual SCBFF is a film festival you can’t afford to miss.

SCBFF culminates with this student film competition. Four judges will vote on selected films in more than a dozen prize categories.

The judges are:

• Screenwriter Allan Loeb (Wall Street 2, Things We Lost in the Fire, 21)
• Randi Chugerman, executive director, ABC Primetime Casting
• Producer Teddy Zee (The Pursuit of Happyness, Hitch)
• Richard Fowkes, former executive vice president of Paramount Pictures and current business affairs executive at Legendary Pictures

Student films will be screened in Bovard from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. Guests will be invited outside for a short reception, before returning to the theater for the Grand Awards Ceremony to see the festival’s remarkable prizes given out.

For a complete prize list and list of award categories, visit www.scbff.com.

Sunday 02/21/2010: 3:00 PM - 8:00 PM

University Park Campus Bovard Auditorium (ADM)

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Magician Ricky Jay and USC professor Howard A. Rodman come together for a dialogue on deception in magic, film and real life.

They will entertainingly explore many of the themes of Mr. Jay’s work, including the selective unreliability of memory; the ways in which the mechanisms of perception allow us to misperceive; and the cognitive and psychological bases of con artistry and magic.

One of the larger foci of the conversation will be what Mr. Jay calls “The Big Con” — the ways in which our own agendas create conditions of non- and misperception. This con is at the heart of most magic tricks, much governance and every Ponzi scheme, and is also the perceptual and narrative basis for cinema.

Mr. Jay and Prof. Rodman will explore the ways in which the human capacity for self-deception is at the heart of much that is enjoyable and essential in modern life (literature, cinema), and much that is execrable (e.g., Bernie Madoff). It is not always possible to know, in the moment, which of our self-deceptions are salutary and which are malign. More often than not, we are unaware of our own self-deception or, worse, eager participants in it.

This delightful and compelling conversation will parse these various cons, illuminating the fields of magic and screenwriting and some of the more bizarre and omnipresent aspects of contemporary life.

While Ricky Jay has long been considered one of the world’s great sleight-of-hand artists, his career is further distinguished by a remarkable variety of accomplishments as an author, actor, historian and consultant. His one-man show Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants was directed by David Mamet and garnered Lucille Lortel and Obie awards for outstanding achievement. His most recent show, Ricky Jay: On the Stem, also directed by Mamet, just closed a seven-month, critically acclaimed run in New York. As an actor, Mr. Jay debuted in the Joseph Papp production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the New York Shakespeare Festival. He has appeared in the David Mamet films House of Games, Homicide, Things Change, The Spanish Prisoner, State and Main and Heist. He can be seen in many other films, including Boogie Nights, Magnolia and Tomorrow Never Dies. He has contributed to many publications and written several books, including Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women and Jay’s Journal of Anomalies, both of which were named “Notable Books of the Year” by The New York Times. He has hosted television specials for CBS, HBO and the BBC, and was the host and narrator of the first documentary miniseries on conjuring, The Story of Magic, for A&E.

Howard A. Rodman is a screenwriter, novelist and educator. He is a professor and former chair of the writing division at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. His films include Savage Grace, starring Julianne Moore, and August, with Josh Hartnett, Rip Torn and David Bowie. His work on Savage Grace was nominated for a 2009 Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay. Rodman also wrote Joe Gould’s Secret, and his original screenplay F. was selected by Premiere magazine as one of Hollywood’s 10 best unproduced screenplays. He has worked with numerous filmmakers, including David Lynch, John McTiernan, Rodrigo García, Errol Morris, Clive Barker, Peter Bogdanovich, Maurice Sendak, Michael Lehmann, Chantal Akerman and Steven Soderbergh (who repaid the favor by giving the name Mr. Rodman to two of the sleazier characters in The Underneath and Traffic). His numerous publications include the novel Destiny Express and articles in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles magazine and The Village Voice (for which he was a monthly columnist). He currently blogs for The Huffington Post.

Friday 02/26/2010: 7:00 PM

University Park Campus School of Cinematic Arts, Room 108

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February 26

7 p.m. Beyond the Years, directed by Im Kwon-taek, 98 minutes

9 p.m. My Dear Enemy, directed by Lee Yoon-ki, 99 minutes

February 27

7 p.m. Rough Cut, directed by Jang Hoon, 97 minutes

9 p.m. For Eternal Hearts, directed by Hwang Kyoo Deok, 102 minutes

February 28

7 p.m. Dream, directed by Kim Ki-duk, 90 minutes

9 p.m. My Friend & His Wife, directed by Sin Dong-il, 96 minutes

Dates: 02/26/2010, 02/27/2010, 02/28/2010: 7:00 PM - 11:00 PM

University Park Campus Eileen Norris Cinema Theatre (NCT)

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A film follows legendary Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour, the most powerful and polarizing figure in fashion.

Hidden behind her trademark bob and sunglasses, Wintour has never allowed anyone to scrutinize the inner workings of her magazine. Until now. With unprecedented access, filmmaker R.J. Cutler’s new film The September Issue does for fashion what he did for politics in The War Room, taking the viewer inside a world they only think they know. 

Every August a record-breaking number of people can’t wait to get their hands on the September issue of Vogue. The 2007 issue was and remains the biggest ever, weighing more than four pounds, reaching an audience of 13 million people, and impacting the $300 billion global fashion industry more than any other single publication.

An intimate, funny and surprising look at Anna Wintour and her team of larger-than-life editors as they create this must-have bible of fashion, The September Issue explores the untouchable glamour of Wintour’s Vogue to reveal the extraordinarily passionate people at its heart. Cutler takes us behind the scenes at Fashion Week, to Europe, on shoots and reshoots, and into closed-door staff meetings, bearing witness to an arduous, entertaining and sometimes emotionally demanding process.

At the eye of this annual fashion hurricane is the two-decade relationship between Wintour and Grace Coddington, incomparable creative director and fashion genius. They are perfectly matched for the age-old conflict between creator and curator. Through them, we see close up the delicate creative chemistry it takes to remain at the top of the ever changing fashion field.

Provided courtesy of Roadside Attractions.
Not PG-13. Running time: 88 minutes.
To learn more about the film and to view the trailer, click here.

About the School of Cinematic Arts Alumni Screening Series

During spring 2010, the series will host a wide array of film screenings and filmmaker Q&As, highlighting recent work by School of Cinematic Arts alumni. All screenings are free to the public but will require an electronic reservation, which can be made through the Web site for each individual screening. Many screenings will be overbooked to ensure that capacity is met in the theater. Some screenings will be run from digital sources.

To view the calendar for the Alumni Screening Series, click here.

About Check-In and Reservations

The theater will be overbooked to ensure capacity, and the RSVP list will be honored on a first-come, first-served basis, with no reserved seating. Please bring a photo ID or printout of your reservation confirmation, which will automatically be sent to your email account once you have successfully made an RSVP through the Web site. Doors will open at 5:30 p.m.

Sunday 02/28/2010: 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM

University Park Campus George Lucas Instructional Building (LUC) Room 108

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Gritty short films, music videos and docs from Kourtrajmé Productions, a Paris-based collective of emerging visual artists, filmmakers, actors and musicians.

“Beautiful women, ugly illegal immigrants, Romanian sneaker pimps, coked-up fashion babes, down-and-out thugs eating shish kebab at 3 a.m. Welcome to our Paris.” — Kourtrajmé Productions, as quoted in Anthem magazine

Kourtrajmé Productions is a collective of emerging French and Francophone visual artists, filmmakers, actors and musicians. The brainchild of internationally acclaimed directors Mathieu Kassovitz and Vincent Cassel, this production house and artist collective has garnered increasing attention and acclaim after getting millions of hits on online sites like Dailymotion and YouTube. Founded by Kim Chapiron, Romain Gavras and Toumani Sangaré, Kourtrajmé produces playful innovations and cutting interventions in popular culture and society that represent the cultural dreams, lives and crises of transnational urban and peri-urban French youth today.

This is a chance to explore the short films, music videos and documentaries that represent what legendary French filmmaker Chris Marker calls a “nouvelle nouvelle vague” of French cinema. Directors from the collective, including Ladj Ly and Toumani Sangaré, will be on hand to answer questions and discuss the group’s history and work.

Organized by Edwin Hill (French and Comparative Literature). Co-sponsored by the Department of French and Italian and French Cultural Services, Los Angeles.

Friday 03/05/2010: 6:00 PM

University Park Campus School of Cinematic Arts, Room 108

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A doc about the long, dramatic struggle to control the Barnes Foundation, a Post-Impressionist and early Modern art collection valued at more than $25 billion.

About The Art of the Steal

In 1922, Dr. Albert C. Barnes created the Barnes Foundation in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania, five miles outside of Philadelphia. He formed this remarkable collection of Post-Impressionist and early Modern art to serve as an educational institution.

Dr. Barnes built his foundation away from the city and cultural elite, who scorned his collection as “horrible, debased art,” and set it on the grounds of his own home, an arboretum in the leafy suburbs. Tastes changed, and soon the very people who belittled Barnes wanted access to his collection.

When Dr. Barnes died in a car accident in 1951, he left control of his collection to Lincoln University, a small African American college. His will contained strict instructions, stating that the foundation should always be an educational institution and that the paintings could never be removed. Such strict limitations made the collection safe from commercial exploitation. But was it really safe?

More than 50 years later, a powerful group of moneyed interests have gone to court to take the art — recently valued at more than $25 billion — and move it to a new museum in Philadelphia. Standing in their way are a group of former students who seek to block the move. Will the students succeed, or will a man’s will be broken and one of America’s greatest cultural monuments be destroyed?

Opens in select Los Angeles theaters on March 12. Available through video-on-demand on February 24.

Provided courtesy of IFC Films and Sundance Selects. Not rated. Running time: 101 minutes.

To learn more about the film and view the trailer, click here.

About Outside the Box (Office)

Outside the Box (Office) is a weekly showcase for upcoming releases, highlighting world cinema, documentary and independent film titles. Recognizing a need for greater diversity on campus, the series will draw from around the globe to present movies that may challenge, inspire or simply entertain. The weekly screenings will be on Wednesday nights (and other select dates, as they arise) in the School of Cinematic Arts Complex, George Lucas Building.

To view the calendar of screenings, click here.

About Check-In and Reservations

The theater will be overbooked to ensure capacity, and the RSVP list will be honored on a first-come, first-served basis, with no reserved seating. Please bring a photo ID or printout of your reservation confirmation, which will automatically be sent to your email account after you successfully RSVP through the Web site. Doors will open at 6:30 p.m.

Wednesday 03/10/2010: 7:00 PM - 10:00 PM

University Park Campus George Lucas Instructional Building (LUC) Room 112

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This Italian film turns a dark page in history, one ignored in the official biography of Benito Mussolini.

There is a secret in the life of Mussolini: a wife and a son, Benito Albino, who was born, acknowledged and then denied. The secret bears a name: Ida Dalser.

When Ida meets Mussolini in Milan, he is the editor of Avanti! and an ardent Socialist who intends to guide the masses towards an anti-clerical, anti-monarchical, socially emancipated future. She has already had a fleeting encounter with him in Trento, and she remains thunderstruck. Ida truly believes in Benito and his ideas. In order to finance Il Popolo d’Italia, a newspaper Mussolini has founded and the nucleus of the forthcoming Fascist Party, Ida sells everything she has.

When the First World War erupts, Mussolini enrolls in the Army and disappears. When Ida finds him again in a military hospital, he is tended to by Rachele, whom he has just married. Ida lashes out at her rival furiously, demanding her rights as Mussolini’s true wife and the mother of his first-born son. She is led away by force.

For more than 11 years, she is locked away in an insane asylum (with her son similarly hidden in an institute). There she is put under physical restraint and tortured, never to see her son again. But Ida will not give up without a fight...

For further details and to RSVP, click here.

Friday 03/12/2010: 7:00 PM - 10:00 PM

University Park Campus George Lucas Instructional Building (LUC) Room 108

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A satellite broadcast of The Metropolitan Opera’s unforgettable new production of Hamlet, starring Simon Keenlyside and Natalie Dessay.

This event is part of an ongoing series of broadcasts presented in spectacular HD digital projection and 5.1 surround sound.

Simon Keenlyside and Natalie Dessay bring their extraordinary acting and singing skills to two of the Bard’s most unforgettable characters in this new production of Ambroise Thomas’ Hamlet. For the role of Ophelia, the French composer created an extended mad scene that is among the greatest in opera.

Conducted by Louis Langrée. Presented in French with English subtitles.

The opera will be preceded by a discussion hosted by the USC Thornton School of Music.

The opera is presented as a rebroadcast of a live performance taking place at The Metropolitan Opera in New York at 10 a.m. that day.

Organized by the USC School of Cinematic Arts in association with The Metropolitan Opera.

Saturday 03/27/2010: 12:00 PM

University Park Campus Eileen Norris Cinema Theatre Frank Sinatra Hall

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By the year 2020, will the seductions of virtual worlds triumph over our desires for communal forms of entertainment?

A panel discussion moderated by Martin Kaplan, director of the USC Annenberg School’s Norman Lear Center, will ask whether people will still go to the theater and movies as home entertainment becomes more sophisticated. In turn, how will this affect the business of entertainment and our culture as a whole?

The discussion will feature Mark Murphy, executive director of REDCAT, an interdisciplinary arts center housed at Walt Disney Concert Hall; Richard Schickel, film critic, historian and documentary-maker; and Tracy Fullerton, associate professor in interactive media at the USC School of Cinematic Arts and director of the Electronic Arts Game Innovation Lab.

Organized by the USC Libraries and the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities

Monday 03/29/2010: 4:00 PM

University Park Campus Doheny Memorial Library Room 233

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Siegel has organized more than 80 exhibitions, including “The Lodz Film School of Poland: 50 Years” (for which he was awarded the Amicus Poloniae from the Polish government), “Tomorrowland: CalArts in Moving Pictures,” “To Save and Project: The MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation” and retrospectives devoted to artists and filmmakers including Jeanne Moreau, Don Siegel, Nicholas Ray, Oskar Fischinger, Ken Jacobs, Killer Films, James Wong Howe, John Frankenheimer, Jean Painlevé, Errol Morris and Frederick Wiseman.

Siegel’s lecture will serve as an introduction to a screening of Wiseman’s Meat (1976), which traces the process through which cattle and sheep become consumer products.

Wednesday 04/07/2010: 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM

University Park Campus Graduate Fine Arts Building Lecture Forum

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A screening of two episodes from the Ken Burns PBS series on our country’s protected wild spaces.

The episodes to be screened are “The Scripture of Nature” and “The Morning of Creation.”

“The Scripture of Nature” details the life of John Muir, for whom preservation became a spiritual calling; the Congressional passing of the act in 1864 protecting Yosemite from commercial development; and the passing of the act in 1871 protecting Yellowstone.

“The Morning of Creation” details the inundation of the parks after World War II, as 62 million visitors flocked to see them. This episode also focuses on Adolph Murie, a biologist; Lancelot Jones, grandson of a slave and property owner; and Jimmy Carter’s protection of 56 million acres of land in Alaska.

Friday 04/09/2010: 12:00 PM - 4:00 PM

University Park Campus USC Fisher Museum of Art

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Join us for a reading and book signing with Robert Pinsky, a world renowned poet, literary critic and translator.

Pinsky’s translation of Dante’s Inferno is among the most praised poetical reimaginings of our time, and his own poetry, including such prize-winning volumes as An Explanation of America, The Figured Wheel and Sadness and Happiness, continues to inspire a wide range of readers. In the book-length essay Thousands of Broadways: Dreams and Nightmares of the American Small Town, Pinsky travels seamlessly from personal history to literary analysis to film. The works of Preston Sturges and Alfred Hitchcock meet up with dazzling insouciance with such writers as William Faulkner, Willa Cather and Thornton Wilder. In his work as U.S. poet laureate and as creator of the Favorite Poem project, Pinsky makes us take literature more seriously and see the way the artistic imagination creates, recreates and transforms the world around us.

In this reading and book signing, Pinsky will bring together his work as a poet and essayist, just as he brings together the very different media of poetry and film, helping us to map the literary terrain of the contemporary world.

Organized by the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. Co-sponsored by The College Commons.

Monday 04/19/2010: 4:00 PM

University Park Campus Doheny Memorial Library Room 240

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This festival will present a wide selection of Corman’s work, interspersed with discussions between directors, producers and actors.

In an extraordinarily prolific career spanning more than five decades, Los Angeles–based independent filmmaker Roger Corman has produced more than 380 motion pictures and television programs and directed more than 50 films. Now in his 80s, he continues to be an active producer, having completed four projects in 2008 alone. Often called the “King of the Bs,” Corman prefers the term “exploitation” to describe his films. Shot quickly with very low budgets and themes ranging from horror to science fiction, nearly all of Corman’s films, he proudly notes, have made money.

In this festival, directors, producers and actors Corman nurtured at the beginning of their careers, along with others from the entertainment industry, will discuss his influence as an independent producer, as well as his successful business model of producing and distributing films throughout the world.

Screenings may include: Little Shop of Horrors (starring Jack Nicholson), House of Usher, Death Race 2000, Piranha, Boxcar Bertha (directed by Martin Scorsese), Caged Heat (directed by Jonathan Demme), Grand Theft Auto (directed by Ron Howard), The Trip (written by Jack Nicholson and starring Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper), X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes (starring Oscar-winning actor Ray Milland) and Dementia 13 (directed by Francis Ford Coppola).

Organized by the USC School of Cinematic Arts

Daily: Friday 04/23/2010 - Sunday 04/25/2010; All day

University Park Campus Eileen Norris Cinema Theatre Frank Sinatra Hall

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