Dean’s Movie Night April 12 to Feature Wiseman Film, Juvenile Court

Documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman ’54 will be at Yale Law School on Tuesday, April 12, for a special Dean’s Movie Night screening and discussion of his film, Juvenile Court. The film will be shown at 7 p.m. in the Whitney Humanities Center located at 53 Wall Street in New Haven; a discussion with Wiseman and Yale Law School Dean Robert Post ’77 will follow. There will be a private reception for the Yale Law School Community and special guests beginning at 6:15 p.m. in Room 108 of the Whitney Humanities Center.

In Juvenile Court, Wiseman shows the complex variety of cases before the Memphis Juvenile Court: foster home placement, drug abuse, armed robbery, child abuse, and sexual offenses. The sequences illustrate the range and the limits of the choices available to the court, the psychology of the offender, and the constitutional and procedural questions involved in administering a juvenile court.

Frederick Wiseman has won numerous awards for his films, including four Emmys, a MacArthur Prize Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His 37 documentaries, which include Titicut Follies, Welfare, Public Housing, and Near Death, are dramatic, narrative films that seek to portray the joy, sadness, comedy, and tragedy of ordinary experience. A 1954 graduate of Yale Law School, he is an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The film screening is sponsored by the Dean’s Office and Student Affairs, the Whitney Humanities Center, and The Yale Film Study Center and Paul L. Joskow; it is open to the Yale community. RSVP to law.studentaffairs@yale.edu with your Yale affiliation by April 4, 2011.