Overview
- The film opened at the Toronto International Film Festival this week and is seeking distribution deals based on festival reviews.
- The story centers on an English teacher, played by Amanda Seyfried, who forms a fraught bond with a charismatic inmate played by Scoot McNairy inside a maximum-security prison.
- Nelson wrote the first draft around 2013 and says it took more than a decade of failed packaging and financing efforts before production finally began last year in Georgia.
- Financing came from V42, a company founded by Miles David Romney that positioned the project as socially conscious while Nelson also appears in the movie as the prison warden.
- Nelson used TIFF appearances to warn that independent dramas face their toughest market in years because investors now demand recent commercial hits, which could push challenging films toward festival-driven release strategies.