UC Riverside’s Palm Desert campus will close out its free movie series featuring films based on banned or challenged young adult books with a screening of “The Kite Runner” next weekend.
The movie will get underway at 1 p.m. Sept. 16 in the Palm Springs Cultural Center, 2300 East Baristo Road, according to a statement from UCR’s Palm Desert Campus. Though the community series is free, attendees are encouraged to RSVP at palmdesert.ucr.edu/events-programs.
The upcoming film follows an Afghani immigrant who is summoned from his California home to Pakistan by his father’s old, dying friend. As a wealthy boy in Afghanistan, he was best friends with a servant’s son, but became tormented with guilt after not being brave enough to save his friend’s father from a brutal assault.
“As there has been a surge in book suppression and censorship across the country, we’ve decided to focus on banned or challenged young adult books,” college officials wrote in a statement. “During the first half of the 2022-2023 school year, PEN America’s index of school book bans lists 1,477 instances of individual books banned, affecting 874 unique titles.”
Faced with choosing three books to be read and discussed for this year’s summer series, college officials also hosted screenings of “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” in July and “Of Mice and Men” in August.
The series launched in 2012 with goals of digging into good writing, having a space to discuss books that have been turned into movies, and to offer educational programming in the desert during summer months, college officials said.
PDC officials said that after more than a decade of the “Lit Flicks” series, it has grown to the point that the college changed venues in order to welcome a larger audience and to get more people involved.