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  Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills Wednesday, January 8 / 7:30 pm / General public $6 / UCSB students $5 UCSB Campbell Hall Paradise Lost 2: Revelations, with the filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofksy Thursday, January 9 / 7:30 pm General public $6 / UCSB students $5 UCSB Campbell Hall Presented as part of the series Executing Justice: America and the Death Penalty Tickets/Information: UCSB Arts & Lectures at 893-3535 Directors Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, acclaimed as two of the most ingenious and provocative documentary filmmakers, will introduce a screening of their film Paradise Lost 2: Revelations (2000) on Thursday, January 9 at 7:30 pm in UCSB Campbell Hall and hold a question and answer session after the film. This event follows the Wednesday, January 8 screening of their film Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996) at 7:30 pm in UCSB Campbell Hall. These two award-winning films present an intimate and disturbing portrait of West Memphis, Arkansas, a town torn apart by the vicious murder of three 8-year-old boys in 1993. Three teenagers were tried and convicted of the crime, largely on the basis of a confession by one of the suspects, a 17-year-old with an IQ of 72. Berlinger and Sinofsky arrived in West Memphis assuming they would be filming a tale of youth gone wrong, but instead observed a scene of justice gone bad. The defendant who confessed tried to recant, and the film reveals he was interrogated for 12 hours without counsel before giving his confession. The accused seem to have been convicted for their interest in witchcraft, dressing in black, and listening to Metallica and other heavy metal bands. And the films, especially Revelations, suggest a different suspect, the outlandish stepfather of one of the slain boys. Since their release, Paradise Lost and Paradise Lost 2 have helped spur a national “Free the Memphis 3” movement (for details see the website http://www.wm3.org), especially as one of the convicted sits on Death Row, while the other two have life sentences. "In making Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky discovered the kind of small-town nightmare that is a documentary filmmaker’s dream,” Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times in 1996. “In this sad, lurid and darkly transfixing story, they locate all the elements of true crime reporting at its most bitterly revealing.” Critics were equally effusive about the sequel. The Boston Globe called Paradise Lost 2 “an unflinching real-life drama as extreme and peculiar as any fictional crime story, including Silence of the Lambs….It’s a work of sustained passion, of inspired journalism rising toward art.” Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky first met in 1986 at Maysles Films, Inc. (run by Albert Maysles, famed director of Grey Gardens and Gimme Shelter), where Berlinger was Executive Producer for television commercials and Sinofsky was Senior Editor for television commercials. Their first independent collaboration was Outrageous Taxi Stories (1989), which Berlinger directed/produced and Sinofsky edited. The film, a humorous look at New York City cab drivers, became a cult favorite on the international film festival circuit. Their next film, Brother’s Keeper, which they jointly produced, directed and edited, was named 1992’s Best Documentary by the Directors Guild of America and the New York Film Critics Circle. Like the Paradise Lost films, Brother’s Keeper explores issues of small town justice, as a rural upstate New York farmer is accused of murdering his sickly brother. The two have done numerous ad spots for television, co-directed Where It’s At: The Rolling Stone State of the Union for ABC-TV and Berlinger moved into fiction film direction with Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2. These two evenings are presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures with the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and the UCSB Law and Society Program with support from the Critical Issues in America Program as part of the series Executing Justice: America and the Death Penalty. For tickets or more information, call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535 or visit online at www.artsandlectures.ucsb.edu. |