Check Out a Clip

Ever see a film as a kid that so captured your imagination that you become obsessed with it for months. You went outside and reenacted it with friends over and over again. You created new grander, more fantastic adventures in your mind for the heroes to get caught up into. Now imagine you’re an imaginative 10-year-old, who due to religious reasons, has never seen a film or TV show. Think about how they would be consumed with the joy of cinema, even if that cinema is a Rambo flick.

Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner, MY BOY JACK) is that imaginative little boy. His father has past away and his mother Mary (Jessica Hynes, SHAUN OF THE DEAD) is doing her best to raise him and his little sister, while taking care of her aged mother, in their ultra-conservative faith. One day while Will sits in the hall while the rest of his class watches a videotape, he has an encounter with the school’s notorious troublemaker Lee Carter (Will Poulter). Inspired by Will’s elaborate sketchbook, Lee blackmails Will into participating in his production for an amateur film contest. To keep his older brother from taking away his video equipment, Lee makes pirated copies of theatrical releases. This is how Will gets his first taste of FIRST BLOOD. Will storyboards their entire film and soon attracts the attention of a very popular French exchange student named Didier Revol (Jules Sitruk). This doesn’t make Lee happy, because he can’t stand Didier and his hordes of clone-like followers.

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Check Out the Trailer

Brett Morgen’s follow-up to his captivating doc THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE, which chronicled the life of infamous Hollywood producer Robert Evans, takes an unconventional approach to the story of the trial of the Chicago 8, a group of the leading anti-war demonstrators following the riots that occurred at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Mixing contemporary protest music with motion-capture animated court re-enactments and archival film footage, the story of the demonstrations and the following trial are intercut creating drama, humor and poignancy. Including defense attorneys William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass into the group, the Chicago 10 were railroaded by a system that seems to be putting the 1960s youth culture on trial not just eight individuals.

In re-enactments of the trial, an all-star cast voices the key characters. Hank Azaria (TV’s MAD ABOUT YOU) voices Abbie Hoffman, who eagerly steps into the spotlight as the key character. The curly longhaired iconoclast was as much a showman as he was an activist. He viewed the entire political system as a carnival fueled by mass media’s desire for big ratings. He never lets an opportunity slip by to provoke the aged conservative judge Julius Hoffman (Roy Scheider, JAWS). At one point in the trial when Bobby Seale (Jeffrey Wright, CASINO ROYALE) demands that his rights be recognized, the judge has him gagged and strapped to his chair. Despite only being at the Convention for one day, the Black Panther founder was charged with the rest as a conspirator to riot. Highlighting even more what was really on trial, prosecutor Thomas Foran (Nick Nolte, 48 HRS.) calls poet Allen Ginsberg (Azaria) to the stand and asks him to recite his poem about wet dreams. What did that have to do with the riots?

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