Directing
News of a massive solar flare goes viral. Soon after, the power is out. Phone's dead. Water taps are dry. Radio is static. Days pass with no news, just people getting more crazy. A week later the fight for survival has already begun.
There have been numerous treatments, in various media, of the horrific 1955 murder in Money, Mississippi, of 14-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till, but none like this concise, stunning dramatization in which actor-writer Mike Wiley plays all 36 roles--black, white, male, female, young, and old. What might sound like a distracting stunt is in fact the film’s distinctive strength. Relying on subtleties of acting rather than heavy makeup, with seamless digital compositing in multi-character scenes, Wiley’s tour de force defamiliarizes the material with startling effectiveness and compels us to get under the skins of all the major players in the tragic events. (Gene Siskel Film Center)
An investigative journalist interviews a reluctant hero who has seen some horrific things in his career as a paramedic. Through the interview, his fantasy as a hero is stripped away to reveal the disturbing truth about his actions.
It is 1956. The previous year, 14-year old Emmett Till from Chicago had gone missing in Money, Mississippi. Later, the boy's mutilated body was found in a river. William Bradford Huie of Look magazine sits down with the two men acquitted for the boy's murder, Roy Bryant Jr. and J.W. Milam, to discuss the trial. Not a word had been uttered outside a courtroom by them or their kin, until now... WOLF CALL, the true-story crafted from public record, transports us back to this historic drama that became a lightning rod for moral outrage and pivotal in inspiring a whole generation of young people to commit to social change in the 1950s.
