Parkland, the feature directorial debut of Peter Landesman, will premiere at the Toronto Film Festival next month and it recently secured a September 20 U.S. theatrical release date through Exclusive Media’s distribution label, Exclusive Releasing. The film recounts the events surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy focusing on ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances.
USA Today recently premiered five pictures from the film, which stars Paul Giamatti as Abraham Zapruder, the man with the camera, Colin Hanks, Jeremy Strong as Lee Harvey Oswald, Zac Efron as a rookie doctor, Billy Bob Thornton as Forrest Sorrels, the head of Dallas’ Secret Service office, Jacki Weaver as Oswald’s mother Marguerite and Marcia Gay Harden as the head nurse in the trauma room. The film gets its title from Parkland Memorial Hospital, where Kennedy was taken after being shot.
“This is a movie about the ground truth from the ground level,” Landesman told USA Today. “What surprised me was the power and poignancy of those who survived that day and the three that followed — the heroism, the instincts and the pathos of those swept up in this tsunami. This is an event that happened to individuals.”
This is a film I’ve been interested in ever since it was announced and one I included on my list of 40 Potential Oscar Contenders back in March. I’ll definitely be seeing it in Toronto and we’ll see how my prediction holds up, but even more important, just hoping it’s a great movie.
Here are the rest of those pictures.
Recounting the chaotic events that occurred in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963, Parkland weaves together the perspectives of a handful of ordinary individuals suddenly thrust into extraordinary circumstances: the young doctors and nurses at Parkland Hospital; Dallas’ chief of the Secret Service; an unwitting cameraman who captured what became the most watched and examined film in history; the FBI agents who nearly had the gunman within their grasp; the brother of Lee Harvey Oswald, left to deal with his shattered family; and JFK’s security team, witnesses to both the president’s death and Vice President Lyndon Johnson’s rise to power over a nation whose innocence was forever altered.
