MEDIA CONTACT: Pat Vaughan Tremmel at (847) 491-4892 or at p-tremmel@northwestern.edu

January 3, 2003

Film Festival Looks at Troubled Youth

CHICAGO --- "Rebel Without a Cause" will launch "Bad Boys/Bad Girls: Youth in Trouble" a two-day film festival that the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University School of Law is hosting as part of the commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the center.

Free and open to the public, the festival will take place Thursday and Friday, Jan. 16 and 17, at Northwestern University School of Law, Thorne Auditorium, 375 E. Chicago Ave.

Part of the School of Law’s Bluhm Legal Clinic, the Children and Family Justice Center is a comprehensive entity offering free legal services to children in crisis. The films deal with many of the issues the center grapples with daily: dysfunctional families, rebellious children, causes of juvenile delinquency, maintenance of traditional family lives in the face of massive social changes, teenage problems and the prevalence of violence.

The festival is designed to get people thinking about the cultivation and imagery of bad adolescents, youth violence and justice for children, according to Bernardine Dohrn, founder and director, Children and Family Justice Center.

Those speaking at the festival include Steven Drizin, an associate clinical professor at the Children and Family Justice Center and an authority on false juvenile confessions, and James Chandler, Barbara E. & Richard J. Franke Professor, University of Chicago.

Schedule of films:

4:30 p.m., Jan. 16, "Rebel Without a Cause." About a teenaged juvenile delinquent, this classic stars James Dean and Natalie Wood. Dean plays a teenage social outcast searching for his identity.

7 p.m., Jan. 16, "A Clockwork Orange." Malcolm MacDowell stars in Stanley Kubrick’s masterful social satire on crime and punishment in an ultra-violent future.

3 p.m., Jan. 17, "Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills." The graphic documentary is about a 1993 triple child murder and indictment and trial of three nonconformist boys based on questionable evidence.

5 p.m., Jan. 17, "The Legend of Billie Jean." About an outlaw 17-year-old girl, the film stars Christian Slater and Helen Slater. When a couple of ruffians cause Billie Jean’s little brother to wreck his scooter, the young woman embarks on a crusade to recover the $600 he needs to fix the bike.

7 p.m., Jan. 17, "Boyz N the Hood." Cuba Gooding Jr, and Larry Fishburne star in John Singleton’s acclaimed film about a teenager caught between the steady guidance of his father and the inescapable violence of his South Central Los Angeles neighborhood.