Indie distributor Neon has purchased domestic rights to Reinaldo Marcus Green’s buzzy Sundance Film Festival title “Monsters and Men.”
The film is director Green’s feature debut, which premiered in the U.S. Dramatic Competition on Friday to acclaim.
“Monsters” tells of a young guy who uses his phone to record the killing of an unarmed black man at the hands of police officers. His subsequent debate on what to do with the footage affects his life and that of two others: a young father striving to support his new family and an African American cop dealing with the fallout of his colleague’s mistake.
The deal was brokered by Endeavor Content. Elizabeth Lodge Stepp and Josh Penn of The Department of Motion Pictures, Sight Unseen’s Eddie Vaisman and Julia Lebedev and Luca Borghese serve as producers.
Executive producers include Sight Unseen’s Leonid Lebedev and Oren Moverman,
Chiara Bernasconi, Charles Miller and The Department of Motion Pictures’ Noah Stahl. Sight Unseen fully financed the film.
Read the full synopsis:
One night, on a nondescript street corner in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, an unarmed black man is killed after an altercation with police officers. This act of violence is central to MONSTERS AND MEN, but only as the starting point for a nuanced investigation into the ripples that course through a tight-knit neighborhood in wake of yet another controversial police intervention. Green takes a story that we’ve, sadly, heard all too often in recent years, and explodes it, creating new opportunities to confront our own prejudices and assumptions head on. MONSTERS AND MEN is an essential artistic attempt to reckon with one of the central challenges of our moment.