Director David LaRosa’s new film, Clandestine, takes an idyllic Long Island suburb, adds methamphetamine, and watches it descend into the midst of America’s unwieldy war on drugs. But LaRosa, a 2012 graduate of the Graduate School of Social Service, said don’t expect to see a good versus bad approach to the crisis.
“There are good people and bad people, but it’s not black and white—most people are a vast array of grey,” he said. “ I knew before but it was driven home by my experience at Fordham.”
LaRosa did a Fordham internship while at GSS with teens doing “crisis type” plays in which participants played out how families dealt with addiction. In a second assignment, he found himself working with patients diagnosed with schizophrenia who had turned to drugs to treat their illness because they didn’t know or understand their diagnosis.
“All of this provided a great perspective of the human struggle,” he said.
The war on drugs isn’t often associated within the serene confines of the suburbs, but the film brings home how national policy plays out in a tight-knit town.
“How do you fight a war when your enemy is your neighbor?” he said. “War is never clean and the war on drugs is no different.”
The film also stars Leslie Coplin, GSS ’13. Coplin is credited for bringing the screening to the University this Sun., Feb. 8 at 1 p.m. at the Lincoln Center campus’s Veronica Lally Kehoe Studio Theatre.
For more information, contact Sarah Whitlock at 212-636-7501 or fordhamsocialworker@gmail.com.
