“Out of Breath,” a socially conscious crime drama from filmmaker Christian Carroll is hitting digital platforms next month through Freestyle Digital Media, which has acquired worldwide VOD rights. Freestyle is a digital distribution unit of Byron Allen’s Allen Media Group (AMG also owns theGrio).
The film is set in New York City in summer 2020 during the tumult of the George Floyd protests and the COVID-19 pandemic. It follows Jean-Michel, an out-of-work actor whose entire day gets flipped on its head after “a confrontation with a racist police officer leaves the cop dead and Jean-Michel on the run,” according to the statement that theGrio obtained.
“As Jean-Michel tries to convince street photographer, Audrey, to flee the city with him, he finds himself at the center of a nationwide reckoning with racial injustice,” the summary continues.
Co-written by Christian Carroll, Tiia Richardson and Mario C. Brown, “Out of Breath” comes to VOD on Nov. 15 after a string of wins on the film festival circuit, including the 2022 Narrative Jury Prize at the Sarasota Film Festival, the 2022 Indie Spirit Award at the Boston International Film Festival and Best Crime Drama at the 2022 Manhattan Film Festival.
In a statement about the film, Carroll said, “Marching on the streets of NYC in the summer of 2020 an idea came to me to make a film that was a loose riff on Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 film “Breathless,“ but set in New York City amidst the pandemic and protests. The film would function as a snapshot of the city at that time.”
Continued Carroll, I became interested in telling a story in which a Black protagonist was both hero and anti-hero and, propelled by a morally dubious action, a dialogue commences where morality is not perfectly clear or binary,” the statement concludes. “A story in which characters are pushed to question their pre-conceptions and allegiances.”
Check out the trailer below:
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