Forest Whitaker, Garrett Hedlund, and Andrea Riseborough are featured in our exclusive poster for the upcoming movie Burden. Written and directed by Andrew Heckler (making his feature debut), the film stars Whitaker as David Kennedy, a reverend from a small town in South Carolina (circa 1996) who tries to keep the peace when a museum celebrating the Ku Klux Klan opens. In order to do so, however, he agrees to help Mike Burden (Helund), a lifelong Klansman, in leaving his violent past behind him and the KKK with it.
Inspired by true events and produced by Robbie Brenner (who received a Best Picture Oscar nomination for Dallas Buyers Club in 2014), Burden features a supporting cast that includes Riseborough and Usher Raymond as, respectively, a single-mother and Mike's old high school friend, in addition to Tom Wilkinson as the KKK leader Tom Griffin. It premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and took home the Dramatic Audience Award, with Heckler landing an additional nomination for the Grand Jury Prize.
Screen Rant is exclusively debuting the poster for Burden, ahead of its release in theaters in February. We've included it in the space below, along with the film's official trailer (for those who haven't seen it already). Both the one-sheet and trailer include pull-quotes from Burden's positive reviews at Sundance two years ago, including those from IndieWire's Katie Erbland and Sean P. Means of The Salt Lake Tribune.
For Hedlund, Burden marks the second film he's starred in dealing with racism in the U.S. South in recent years, following his performance in Dee Rees' Oscar-nominated period drama Mudbound in 2017. Whitaker and Wilkinson are far from strangers to this type of true story-based material either, with the former (an Oscar-winner for The Last King of Scotland) having played a semi-fictionalized version of real-life White House butler Eugene Allen (renamed Cecil Gaines) in Lee Daniels' The Butler in 2013. A year after that, Wilkinson played Lyndon B. Johnson in Ava DuVernay's Selma, a drama about Martin Luther King Jr. and the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches.
Burden is being released in U.S. theaters by 101 Studios, which is the relatively newly-formed studio that also distributed last year's The Current War (more specifically, director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon's preferred cut of the delayed biographical drama) starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Nicholas Hoult as, respectively, Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. The film opens in select markets at the end of next month on Friday, February 28.