First-Friday Free Film Series, 7p.m., at the Peace Center of Delaware County, 1001 Old Sprould Road, Springfield, PA (directions and more at www.delcopeacecenter.org), Co-sponsored by the Brandywine Peace Community, (610) 544-1818.  Free refreshments and after-film discussion.

March 5, 7p.m. 
2010 Academy Award Nominee
The Hurt Locker (2009)

131 minutes, Rated R for war violence and language
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Starring Jeremy Renner, Guy Pearce, Ralph Fiennes, David Morse 

WAR IS A DRUG

Among the most acclaimed films of 2009, The Hurt Locker is unlike any war film, Iraq war or otherwise, you've likely ever seen. The Hurt Locker opens with a quote from War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, a best-selling 2002 book by New York Times war correspondent and journalist Chris Hedges: "The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug."

The Hurt Locker follows a United States Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team during the early insurgency following the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March of 2003. The story was written by Mark Boal, a freelance writer who was embedded with a bomb squad in Iraq and was directed by Kathryn Bigelow.

A. O. Scott of The New York Times called The Hurt Locker the best American feature film yet made about the war in Iraq: "You may emerge from "The Hurt Locker" shaken...but you will also be thinking..." The critic noted its different take on the Iraq War, "It confronts the act that men often take great pleasure in war."..."there is something original and distinctive about the film's willingness to admit that for some men war carries an intrinsic dramatic charge."

April 2010 marks the 35th Anniversary of the end of the U.S. war in Vietnam.  Coming to the Peace Center of Delaware County on April 2 the classic film about the tragedy of the Vietnam War and the militarization of U.S. society, the Academy-Award winning documentary of 1974, HEARTS & MINDS.