Whoopi Goldberg, Haley Bennett, and Danielle Deadwyler all star in the upcoming film, due out this October.
Earlier this month, the late Emmett Till’s name became a popular topic of conversation online as his family called for the arrest of Carolyn Bryant Donham after uncovering an unserved warrant for her dating back to Emmett’s untimely 1955 death.
Though it may not possible for the newly discovered document to send the elderly woman to jail anymore, the late 14-year-old boy’s story will be told on the big screen later this year in Chinonye Chukwu’s Till biopic.
Young Emmett Till — Bettmann/Getty Images
MGM Studios unveiled the trailer for the new release today (July 25), which follows young Emmett on his fateful trip from Chicago to Mississippi, where he was visiting relatives when then-21-year-old Donham falsely accused him of whistling at her and making attempts to grab her hand and waist at the grocery store.
Just a few days later, the teenager was kidnapped from the house he was staying at by Donham’s husband at the time, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W Milam. The two men proceeded to severely beat and mutilate their captor before shooting him.
To add insult to injury, they then tied a large metal fan around his neck with barbed wire and threw his body in the Tallahatchie River.
In September of 1955, an all-white jury acquitted Bryant and Milam of the crimes, though in a magazine interview following the trial, they both admitted to having killed Till.
Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley insisted on holding an open-casket funeral because “[she] wanted the world to see what they did to [her] boy.”
The film finds her played by The Harder They Fall actress Danielle Deadwyler, and in the trailer, she says, “The lynching of my son has shown me that what happens to any of us anywhere in the world had better be the business of us all.”
Other famous faces cast in the upcoming biopic include Whoopi Goldberg, Frankie Faison, Jalyn Hall, as well as Haley Bennett in the role of Donham.
Check out the trailer below, and look out for Till premiering in select theatres on October 14th and nationwide on October 28th.
[Via]