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Strip Search featured at Law School Forum Apr. 11

posted 18 years ago by actprodny
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As reported on Justin Bartha fan website - www.justinbartha.altervista.org

"Strip Search" the HBO cable film in which Justin Bartha appeared will be covered in a special forum at Fordham Law School's program "Strip Searches, The Body Politic, and the Price of Post-9/11 Security" on Tuesday Apr. 11th at the Time Warner Center in Columbus Circle, New York City...10th Floor Screening Room, 1 Time Warner Center, 58th Street, 7:30 pm reception with the artists, program at 8:00 pm.

Director of the film, Sidney Lumet and writer/producer Tom Fontana will appear to discuss the film and show clips from it. They will discuss how and why the legal system has been the subject of so much of their work over the years and how they have portrayed justice and injustice in their art.

This is the second in a series of an ongoing "Forum on Law, Culture, and Society" by Fordham University's School of Law.

[–] mflint22 17 years ago

What a fascinating program. I wish I could have been there to hear this. Have the speeches, discussion been recorded in print anywhere?
I saw 'Strip Search' its first night on HBO. Though it contained scenes that I find the hardest of all to watch, the vulnerable in the hands of the merciless, I found it an excellent film. I wish it had received a much wider circulation in theaters.
Looking back at the timing is revealing and amazing: The film was released April 26 2004: two nights before CBS aired the Abu Ghraib photographs of prisoner abuse (which had taken place Oct to Nov 2003)
I was shocked how little critical coverage the film received in the media at the time, and that I could find no friend or acquaintance who had seen it. Given the proof of Abu Ghraib photos and the details from Guantanamo, Alessandra Stanley's review of the film in the New York Times on April 27, 2004 seems naive & terribly mistaken. (Though she might be forgiven for wanting to defend the US justice from being equated with the excesses of the Chinese secret police. Wouldn't we all prefer there to be no comparison? However, our hopes were about to be shattered by the publication of the photos) Here are her opening remarks:

"''Strip Search,'' an intensely earnest, painfully wrongheaded film on HBO tonight, tries to sound an alarm about the erosion of civil liberties under the Patriot Act by likening the detention of a Muslim immigrant in the United States to that of an American student in China.
The problem is not just that this kind of melodramatic moral equivalency is silly and specious... " (Alessandra Stanley. NYT. April 27, 2004.)

In retrospect 'Strip Search' can be seen to be prescient and absolutely accurate in its portrayal of sexual humiliation and torture visited on prisoners in American custody.