What’s a Matta U? Considering the College Experience Through Film

September 17, 2009 - November 19, 2009

Wristcutters: A Love Story, November 19

Beyond appreciating their visual textures and evocative sounds, one of the many reasons why we watch films is for their power to illuminate our own lived experience. Great stories, whether epic or intimate in scale, can register with our own sense of the world, invoking familiar feelings and affinities. What’s a Matta U?, an ongoing series beginning this fall, considers what it means to be a student (or anyone, for that matter) who has grappled with social identity, peer pressure, body image, and other dynamic factors that influence how we become who we are. Every two months we’ll see a film selected and introduced by Reyna Cowan, a psychotherapist and KPFA film critic. After each screening, our host will guide us in critically reading the film, and help us to create a method for reading ourselves.

Thursday, September 17, 2009
7:00 p.m. The Wild Child
François Truffaut (France, 1969). Discussion led by Reyna Cowan. This fact-based tale of a “wolf boy” and the teacher who sets out to tame him is Truffaut’s “most thoughtful statement on his favorite subject: the way young people grow up, explore themselves, and attempt to function creatively in the world.”—Roger Ebert (83 mins)

Thursday, November 19, 2009
7:00 p.m. Wristcutters: A Love Story
Goran Dukic (U.S., 2006). Introduced by Reyna Cowan. “A lovely-loony picture about an afterlife for suicides. It’s an off-road ‘road movie’ about people who off themselves.”—Baltimore Sun (89 mins)

Presented in conjunction with the Tang Center at UC Berkeley.