BOSTON

      Established in the winter of 1998 in Kendall Square, our Boston chapter moved to the Coolidge Corner Theatre in the fall of 1999 and a year later settled at its current location at the West Newton Cinemas. Linda Dittmar and Brittain Smith continue to lead stimulating discussions about our advanced Sunday morning art film screenings.

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RECENT FILMS SCREENED BY OUR BOSTON CLUB
96% on the Key Meter	SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE The story of Jamal Malik, an 18 year-old orphan from the slums of Mumbai, who is about to experience the biggest day of his life. With the whole nation watching, he is just one question away from winning a staggering 20 million rupees on India's "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" But when the show breaks for the night, police arrest him on suspicion of cheating; how could a street kid know so much? Desperate to prove his innocence, Jamal tells the story of his life in the slum where he and his brother grew up, of their adventures together on the road, of vicious encounters with local gangs, and of Latika, the girl he loved and lost. Each chapter of his story reveals the key to the answer to one of the game show's questions.
91% on the Key Meter	STRANDED: I'VE COME FROM A PLANE THAT CRASHED ON THE MOUNTAINS On October 13, 1972, a young rugby team from Montevideo, Uruguay, boarded a plane for a match in Chile... and then vanished into thin air. Two days before Christmas, 16 of the 45 passengers miraculously resurfaced. They had managed to survive for 72 days after their plane crashed on a remote Andean glacier. Thirty-five years later, the survivors returned to the crash site -- known as the Valley of Tears -- to recount their harrowing story of defiant endurance and indestructible friendship. Previously documented in the 1973 worldwide bestseller ALIVE (and the 1993 Ethan Hawke movie of the same name), this shocking true story finally gets the cinematic treatment it deserves. Visually breathtaking and crafted with riveting detail by documentary filmmaker (and childhood friend of the survivors) Gonzalo Arijon with a masterful combination of on-location interviews, archival footage and reenactments, STRANDED is by turns hauntingly powerful and spiritually moving.
96% on the Key Meter	I'VE LOVED YOU SO LONG After more than a decade apart, estranged sisters Juliette and Lea try to rebuild their fractured relationship. But the task is hardly easy, considering Juliette's past. She's been in jail for 15 years -- for killing her own son. As she settles into small-town life with Lea's family, the locals can't help but talk.
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Co-Moderator Linda Dittmar

Born in Israel, Linda has just retired as Professor Emerita from the University of Massachusetts--Boston, where she taught courses on film and literature. She has edited two books in film--From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film and Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism--and contributed numerous articles, essays and book chapters on film, literature and visual culture to journals. Winner of UMB's Chancellor Teaching Award and a Fulbright Foundation grant, she has also lectured widely abroad, including Israel, France, and India.

Co-Moderator Brittain Smith

Brittain Smith (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is a graduate of the Institute for Teaching Film as Film, directed by professors Rick Rentschler (Harvard) and Anton Kaes (Berkeley). Currently a freelance writer, he is former assistant professor of German at Boston University, where he taught courses in Weimar Cinema (Pabst, Lubitsch, Lang, et al.) and in New German Cinema (Wenders, Herzog, Fassbinder, et al.). He is a manuscript editor for the journal Film Criticism and has directed film festivals at Allegheny College and at Loyola University.

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