LIVE FILM PROGRAM (ALSO AVAILABLE ONLINE THROUGH ZOOM & VIMEO)

Luce (Julius Onah, 2019, 109min.)
Christopher Llewellyn Reed, chair, film & moving image department, Stevenson University

In Luce, adapted from J.C. Lee’s eponymous play, director Julius Onah delivers a gripping, thought-provoking cinematic essay on race, gender, colonialism, class, power, and privilege (white and otherwise). Starring Kelvin Harrison Jr. as the titular high-school senior, the movie follows the misadventures of Luce, adopted from war-torn Eritrea by white parents, along with his family, friends, and schoolteachers as they struggle to reconcile their own mythologies about race with real life. Naomi Watts and Tim Roth play the adoptive parents, joined by Octavia Spencer as a teacher whose suspicions about Luce’s true nature spark a flame that rips through everyone’s optimistic expectations. No one is what they seem if the seeming is how you see them.

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Film Series Overview - Take 2: Cinematic Adaptations of the Written Word

Adapting any creative work from one medium into a vastly different one is always tricky. Readers of literature, in particular, tend to feel a very strong ownership of any source novel or story that gets the cinematic treatment, and often complain about how much the book has been altered—usually not for the better—in its transformation. But writers and film directors work under vastly different imperatives, and what is good as text may not be good as image, and vice versa. The best adaptations are often those where, faithful or not to the book, the director has a vision, and the movie has a raison d'être beyond the mercenary. Join us as we examine six provocative literary adaptations and explore how the written word translates to the screen. And don’t worry: if you don’t have time to read the original text, we’ll explain how the films compare and contrast with their sources. In order, our movies are Luce (Julius Onah, 2019), Elle (Paul Verhoeven, 2016), The Furies (Anthony Mann, 1950), Purple Noon (René Clément, 1960), Devil in a Blue Dress (Carl Franklin, 1995), and Border (Ali Abbasi, 2018).