THE TRUE EVENTS THAT INSPIRED THE UPCOMING MAJOR MOTION PICTURE
Starring Forest Whitaker, written and directed by Andrew Heckler, and
produced by Robbie Brenner (Dallas Buyers Club)
**
A harrowing true story of the modern Ku Klux Klan and an act of grace
that shook a community in the Deep South.**
In 1996, the town of Laurens, South Carolina, was thrust into the
international spotlight when a white supremacist named Michael Burden
opened a museum celebrating the Ku Klux Klan on the community's main
square. Journalists and protestors flooded the town, and hate groups
rallied to the establishment's defense, dredging up the long history of
racial violence in this formerly prosperous mill town.
What came next is the subject of an upcoming major motion picture
starring Forest Whitaker, Garrett Hedlund, Tom Wilkinson, Andrea
Riseborough, and Usher Raymond. Shortly after his museum opened, Michael
Burden abruptly left the Klan at the urging of a woman he fell in love
with. Broke and homeless, he was taken in by Reverend David Kennedy, an
African American preacher and leader in the Laurens community, who
plunged his church headlong in a quest to save their former enemy.
In this spellbinding Southern epic, journalist Courtney Hargrave
uncovers the complex events behind the story told in the film--20 years
in the making from writer-director Andrew Heckler, and winner of the
2018 Sundance Audience Award. Hargrave explores the choices that led to
Kennedy and Burden's friendship, the social factors that drive young men
to join hate groups, the intersection of poverty and racism in the
divided South, and the difference one person can make in confronting
America's oldest sin.
