Seminarians for Justice Invite McCormick Community to Screening of "The Interrupters"

09-12-2014

Dovetailing with McCormick's reading of "Peacemaking in the City: A Faithful Response to Urban Violence," the film looks at the organization CeaseFire, now CureViolence.

The screening will be on Thursday, September 18, in LSTC Room 350 at 7:00 p.m. Seminarians for Justice has invited the McCormick Community to join them for a screening of "The Interrupters", an award-winning documentary on the violence in Chicago neighborhoods. Seminarians for Justice, a group formed at LSTC, is studying many of the same issues that McCormick will be as the community reads "There Are No Children Here." (Reading Schedule)

'The Interrupters tells the moving and surprising stories of three Violence Interrupters who try to protect their Chicago communities from the violence they once employed. From acclaimed director Steve James and bestselling author Alex Kotlowitz, this film is an unusually intimate journey into the stubborn persistence of violence in our cities. Shot over the course of a year out of Kartemquin Films, The Interrupters captures a period in Chicago when it became a national symbol for the violence in our cities. During that period, the city was besieged by high-profile incidents, most notably the brutal beating of Derrion Albert, a Chicago High School student, whose death was caught on videotape.

The film's main subjects work for an innovative organization, CeaseFire. It was founded by an epidemiologist, Gary Slutkin, who believes that the spread of violence mimics the spread of infectious diseases, and so the treatment should be similar: go after the most infected, and stop the infection at its source. One of the cornerstones of the organization is the "Violence Interrupters" program, created by Tio Hardiman, who heads the program. The Interrupters (who have credibility on the streets because of their own personal histories) intervene in conflicts before they explode into violence.' (CeaseFire is now known as CureViolence: http://cureviolence.org/)

NOTE: though the film is not "officially" rated, there is a substantial amount of profane language in the film, characteristic of the situations it portrays.

The description of the film is excepted from its website: http://interrupters.kartemquin.com/