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The annual Forum Film Festival offers you the unique opportunity to watch and discuss movies dealing with legal themes, with a box of popcorn in hand and surrounded by a large audience, most of whom are not lawyers, so you don’t need to know any legalese. Featuring an exciting mix of current blockbusters, classic favorites, documentaries, and independent movies over six nights, the Film Festival illuminates the legal system with all of its triumphs, failures, moral dilemmas, and dramatic moments.

Each movie is followed by a post-screening discussion with renowned artists, writers, public intellectuals, and members of the legal profession who have a particular connection to the film. Explore how the themes of justice and injustice continue to inspire the artistic imagination. Hear interesting stories and anecdotes. Get answers to your questions. And share your own ideas and viewpoints.

Events / Film Festival Schedule / 2009

2009 Film Festival

The 4th Annual Forum Film Festival was a tale of two famous film directors: Peter Bogdanovich and Barry Levinson. The legendary filmmakers discussed how matters of guilt, innocence, and revenge can be the subject for astonishing motion pictures. Other screenings dealt with the gross injustices in the Deep South during the Civil Rights Movement, the incivility that always arises from divorce, and how the First Amendment has held up after 9/11.

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  • The HBO Documentary Film
    Shouting Fire: Stories from the Edge of Free Speech

    • Liz Garbus - Emmy-Winning and Oscar-Nominated Filmmaker
    • Martin Garbus - Noted First Amendment Attorney
    • Abner S. Greene - Professor, Fordham Law School
    • Filmmaker Liz Garbus provides a look at the changing interpretations of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution post-9/11. The HBO documentary film features her father, First Amendment attorney Martin Garbus, who talks about the history and current state of free speech in America.

  • Anatomy of a Murder

    • Peter Bogdanovich - Legendary Filmmaker
    • This classic law-related film, directed by Otto Preminger, tells the story of a murder trial where a small-town lawyer (Jimmy Stewart) defends a lieutenant in the army (Ben Gazzara). The defendant claims that he suffered temporary insanity after the victim raped his wife (Lee Remick).

  • Erin Brockovich

    • Erin Brockovich
    • William Michael Treanor - Dean, Fordham Law School
    • Julia Roberts portrays an unemployed single mother who becomes a legal assistant and almost single-handedly brings down a California power company accused of polluting a city's water supply.

  • Mississippi Burning

    • Jack Greenberg - Civil Rights Attorney; Longtime Director of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund
    • Sheila Foster - Associate Dean, Fordham Law School
    • Robin A. Lenhardt – Professor, Fordham Law School
    • Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe star in this fictionalized account of the FBI agents who investigated the 1964 slaying of three civil rights workers in rural Mississippi.

  • the War of the roses

    • Warren Adler – Novelist; Author, The War of the Roses
    • Raoul Felder – Noted Divorce Attorney
    • Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner star in the adaptation of Warren Adler’s darkly comic novel about a married couple who try everything to get each other to leave the house in a vicious divorce battle.

  • Sleepers

    • Barry Levinson – Academy Award-winning Filmmaker
    • Lorenzo Carcaterra – Novelist; Author, Sleepers
    • Charles J. Hynes – District Attorney and Novelist
    • Robert Deniro, Dustin Hoffman, Brad Pitt, Kevin Bacon, Ron Eldard, and Billy Crudup are featured in this adaptation of Lorenzo Carcaterra’s controversial memoir based on the human tragedy of damage and revenge.