I am in the middle of overhauling the predictions layout for my Oscar Contenders section in hopes of having everything up and running by the middle of September, once I’ve returned home from the Toronto International Film Festival and the likes of Venice, Telluride and the New York Film Festival will have landed and the 2011-2012 Awards Season will be in full swing. That said, one of the films that will be showing in Toronto I’ve actually already seen, and that’s Machine Gun Preacher, an intensely sad, yet uplifting true life story of Sam Childers, a former drug-dealing criminal who undergoes an astonishing transformation and finds an unexpected calling as the savior of hundreds of kidnapped and orphaned children.
As the credits on the film roll, images and video of the real Childers (who’s portrayed by Gerard Butler in the film) play on screen, giving you glimpses at the real people you’ve just seen in the film accompanied by an original song made for the film by Chris Cornell, previously of Soundgarden and Audioslave. The track is called “The Keeper” and thanks to a heads up from Kris Tapley over at In Contention, I was directed to Cornell’s official website where the song is available along with a chance to donate to Sam Childer’s Angels of East Africa charity.
You can listen to the song directly below in the HTML5 player and it will be made available for purchase at iTunes on August 30 followed by the full soundtrack album on September 20.
For more information on the film, which begins its platform release on September 23, you can click here.
Machine Gun Preacher is the inspirational true story of Sam Childers, a former drug-dealing criminal who undergoes an astonishing transformation and finds an unexpected calling as the savior of hundreds of kidnapped and orphaned children. Gerard Butler (300) delivers a searing performance as Childers, the impassioned founder of the Angels of East Africa rescue organization in Golden Globe-nominated director Marc Forster’s (Monster’s Ball, Finding Neverland) moving story of violence and redemption. When ex-biker-gang member Sam Childers (Butler) makes the life-changing decision to go to East Africa to help repair homes destroyed by civil war, he is outraged by the unspeakable horrors faced by the region’s vulnerable populace, especially the children. Ignoring the warnings of more experienced aide workers, Sam breaks ground for an orphanage where it’s most needed–in the middle of territory controlled by the brutal Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a renegade militia that forces youngsters to become soldiers before they even reach their teens. But for Sam, it is not enough to shelter the LRA’s intended victims. Determined to save as many as possible, he leads armed missions deep into enemy territory to retrieve kidnapped children, restoring peace to their lives–and eventually his own. The explosive, real-life tale of a man who has rescued over a thousand orphans from starvation, disease and enslavement, Machine Gun Preacher also stars Michelle Monaghan (Due Date), Kathy Baker (Cold Mountain), Madeline Carroll (Mr. Popper’s Penguins), Academy Award(R) nominated Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road) and Souleymane Sy Savane (“Damages”).
