Safe
Before the film, Prof. Laura Vanderberg will give an overview of how early life exposures to chemicals and chemical mixtures can predispose individuals to diseases that manifest later in life.
Julianne Moore gives a breakthrough performance as Carol White, a Los Angeles housewife in the late 1980s who comes down with a debilitating illness. After the doctors she sees can give her no clear diagnosis, she comes to believe that she has frighteningly extreme environmental allergies. A profoundly unsettling work from the great American director Todd Haynes, Safe functions on multiple levels: as a prescient commentary on self-help culture, as a metaphor for the AIDS crisis, as a drama about class and social estrangement, and as a horror film about what you cannot see. This revelatory drama was named the best film of the 1990s in a Village Voice poll of more than fifty critics. — Criterion Collection
About Laura Vandenberg
Dr. Laura Vandenberg earned her BS degree from Cornell University in 2003 and her PhD from Tufts University School of Medicine in 2008. After postdoc positions at The Forsyth Institute at Harvard School of Dental Medicine and Tufts University, Dr. Vandenberg joined the faculty in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in Fall 2013. Dr. Vandenberg’s laboratory research focuses on how low level exposures to environmental chemicals can induce diseases including infertility, metabolic syndrome, and breast cancer. Dr. Vandenberg is an author on 70 peer reviewed papers and nine book chapters. She has served on a number of US and international expert panels to assess endocrine disrupting chemicals and is regularly asked to speak at conferences around the world.
