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Film Club

Conversations on Essential Cinema: 12 Angry Men

June 10, 2020

In line with our commitment to serving you during this time of crisis, in a new and exciting effort to bring you entertaining commentary on films we feel everyone should see and know about, we have launched FOLCS’ Conversations on Essential Cinema: A Virtual Film Club. Watch a classic movie and then hear a film critic or scholar discuss the film in an online Conversation.

12 Angry Men (1957) was the focus of FOLCS’ second Virtual Film Club.

Sidney Lumet’s iconic film stars Henry Fonda, a righteous juror who seeks to convince eleven fellow jurors of the innocence of an 18-year-old Latino charged with murder. Perhaps the most radical legal drama ever made, the film provides an inside look at the American legal system and expresses the power of the individual to produce change.

On June 10, 2020, FOLCS was joined by award-winning actor Matthew Modine, for a conversation.

This event was produced in partnership with the New York Film Academy (NYFA).

Watch Conversations on Essential Cinema: 12 Angry Men here.

See more from FOLCS here.

Matthew Modine
Actor

In addition to being an internationally renowned, actor, filmmaker, author and photographer, Matthew Modine is a political activist and environmentalist. He has worked with many of the film industry’s most acclaimed directors on projects including Birdy, Full Metal Jacket, Dark Knight Rises, Married to the Mob, Vision Quest, Memphis Belle, Shortcuts, Showtime’s Weeds and the Netflix global phenomenon, Stranger Things.

Modine has performed on Broadway including The Miracle Worker in London’s West End, Arthur Miller’s Resurrection Blues directed by Robert Altman, and played Atticus Finch in a theatrical production of To Kill a Mockingbird at the Hartford Stage which became the most successful production in the theatre’s 60 year history. He has been nominated for multiple Emmy awards and is the recipient of a Golden Globe Award, Venice Film Festival Volpi Cup and Golden Lion for his work as an actor. He is the author of the award winning book, Full Metal Jacket Diary.

Modine has worked in the environmental sector for over four decades. He studied oceanography in San Diego and has been passionate advocate for the health and protection of the world’s oceans and sea life. Bicycling has been his primary form of transportation since moving to New York in 1980. Most of his environmental accomplishments are based on common sense solutions. In the mid-90’s, he single-handedly convinced the William Morris Talent Agency to evolve away from single page script printing to double-sided, effectively cutting industry wide paper consumption in half. He shared this idea of paper reduction with other actors and agencies and double-sided scripts became the industry standard, saving billions of sheets of paper over the years. While working on a film in Ouarzazate, Morocco, Modine helped to institute a plastic bottle deposit and recycling program. The effort not only cleared the desert of discarded bottles, but provided young kids that collected the bottles with pocket money (as it did for Modine when he was a boy). He is the founder of Bicycle for a Day (BFAD), whose mission is to encourage bicycling as a way toward better health and environmental sustainability. BFAD’s first event attracted some 14,000 participants. Presently, he is working on his global DO-ONE Campaign, a viral video campaign which encourages and empowers individuals to “do one” thing everyday to reduce wasteful behaviors. Modine has served on the board of NYC’s Transportation Alternatives, Madison Square Garden’s Garden of Dreams Foundation, Lustgarten Pancreatic Cancer Foundation, Van Cortlandt Park Conservancy, Bronx NY, the Director of Humanitarian Activities for Twisted Sun, Inc. and the acting President of Hyper Chariot. Modine is an avid supporter of The Wounded Warrior Project, Purple Heart Foundation and God’s Love We Deliver.