Saban Films has announced they will release the upcoming thriller, The Forgiven, in theaters on March 9 with a theatrical expansion on March 16 to also include VOD and Digital HD. Directed by Academy Award nominee Roland Joffé (The Killing Fields, The Mission) and starring Academy Award winner Forest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland, The Butler) and Eric Bana (Munich, Troy), the film was co-written by Joffé and Michael Ashton, and based on Ashton’s play The Archbishop and The Antichrist. The Forgiven had its world premiere at the 2017 BFI London Film Festival.
In The Forgiven, when Archbishop Desmond Tutu (Whitaker) is appointed to head a nationwide investigation, he’s summoned to a maximum-security prison by a notorious murderer seeking clemency (Bana). Inside the brutal prison walls, Tutu is drawn into a dangerous, life-changing battle with the cunning criminal.
The Forgiven is produced by Joffé alongside Link Entertainment’s Craig Baumgarten and Zaheer Goodman-Bhyat of Light and Dark Films, with financing being provided by The Fyzz Facility. Kim Ashton, Wayne Marc Godfrey, Robert Jones, John R. Sherman, Tannaz Anisi, Greg Schenz, Jeff Gum, Jeff Rice, Lee Broda executive produced.
Whitaker has made a career out of playing actual people in dramas previously taking on the role of musician Charlie Parker Jr in Bird, dictator Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland (for which he won the Academy Award in 2006), theologian and educator James L. Farmer, Sr. in The Great Debaters, and Cecil Gaines, based on real life figure Eugene Allen, in Lee Daniels’ The Butler.
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