Study Guide Themes Archives: Social Justice

The Homestretch

Three homeless teenagers brave Chicago winters, the pressures of high school, and life alone on the streets to build a brighter future. Against all odds, these kids defy stereotypes as they create new, surprising definitions of home. Can they recover from the traumas of abandonment and homelessness and build the future they dream of?

Continue Reading

Heat Wave

As the Watts riots erupted one steamy night in 1965, the Los Angeles Times sent its reporters to the scene – white men who, soon after they arrived, had to run for their lives. Then Bob Richardson, a young African American messenger for the paper, volunteered to cover the story alone. He braved fire, fury, bullets and death to report the courage and the cowardice, injustice and hate that engulfed the streets. His work helped earn the Times a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the uprising. Heat Wave tells the dynamic true story of America on the brink of racial meltdown and of citizens – black and white – who refused to allow violence to conquer hope.

Continue Reading

Harlem Aria

An aspiring opera singer from Harlem teams up with a charismatic busker and a kindhearted hustler to share his voice with the world, and teaches his two newfound friends the importance of taking your destiny into your own hands.

Continue Reading

Grey Gardens

Grey Gardens is a hypnotic, tragic and affectionate classic, featuring 79-year-old Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edie, the aunt and cousin of Jackie Kennedy. Sharing a decaying seaside mansion with countless cats and rodents, the disarmingly eccentric duo competes for attention, revealing a complex relationship, as well as some famously far-out fashion experiments.

Continue Reading

Grand Illusion

One of the very first prison escape movies, Grand Illusion is hailed as one of the greatest films ever made. Jean Renoir’s antiwar masterpiece stars Jean Gabin and Pierre Fresnay as French soldiers held in a World War I German prison camp, and Erich von Stroheim as the unforgettable Captain von Rauffenstein.

Continue Reading