Tony Kaye

Director Tony Kaye's (AMERICAN HISTORY X) long-awaited film stars Academy Award(R) winner Adrien Brody as a substitute teacher who avoids emotional connections by never staying anywhere long enough to form a bond with either his students or colleagues.

Director Tony Kaye's (AMERICAN HISTORY X) long-awaited film DETACHMENT stars Academy Award(R) winner Adrien Brody as Henry Barthes, a substitute teacher who conveniently avoids any emotional connections by never staying anywhere long enough to form a bond with either his students or colleagues. A lost soul grappling with a troubled past, Henry finds himself at a public school where an apathetic student body has created a frustrated, burned-out administration. In finding an emotional connection to the students but also to fellow teachers and a runaway teen, he finds that he's not alone in a life and death struggle to find beauty in a seemingly vicious and loveless world. Kaye has molded a contemporary vision of people who become increasingly distant from others while still feeling the need to connect. DETACHMENT features a stellar ensemble cast, including Academy Award(R) winner Marcia Gay Harden, Christina Hendricks, William Petersen, Bryan Cranston, Tim Blake Nelson, Lucy Liu, Blythe Danner, Academy Award(R) nominees James Caan, and newcomers Sami Gayle and Betty Kaye.

The film tells the story of Derek Vinyard (Norton), taking place in the late 1980s and early 1990s. An extremely bright and charismatic student, Derek is drawn into the neo-Nazi underground after his father, a firefighter, is shot and killed by a black drug dealer while fighting a fire in a crack house. Derek had already been influenced by his father's critical views on black culture and affirmative action (his father refers to it as 'affirmative blacktion'), and his outlook was so galvanized by the circumstances of the murder that when asked how he felt about his fathers death by a news reporter, he launched a racist tirade on a local TV station.

Ever since Roe v. Wade, the United States has been deeply divided on the issue of abortion. In that landmark case, an unmarried pregnant woman was refused an abortion in Texas and, with the ensuing judicial challenge, won American women the right to safe, legal abortions. Ever since, proponents and opponents have lined up on either side of the issue, launching verbal abuse and worse at each other. As the religious right has increased in size and power in the past decade, the issue has become even more divisive and violent. Filmmaker Tony Kaye, best known for American History X, has been working on Lake of Fire for the past fifteen years and has made a film that is unquestionably the definitive work on the subject of abortion. Shot in luminous black and white, which is in fact an endless palette of grays, the film has the perfect esthetic for a subject where there can be no absolutes, no right or wrong. He gives equal time to both sides, covering arguments from either extremes of the spectrum, as well as those at the center, who acknowledge that, in the end, everyone is right or wrong. With graphic images of termination procedures and their aftermath, Kaye endeavors to show abortion s physical and psychological reality to make clear what exactly is at stake. Lake of Fire the film s title comes from one person s description of what awaits abortionists in hell is a brave film, even a monumental one. And whatever you believe now, you are certain to think differently after seeing it.