Emancipation(Movie, 2022)

Emancipation is a 2022 American historical action thriller film directed by Antoine Fuqua and co-produced by Will Smith, who stars as a runaway slave headed for Baton Rouge, Louisiana in the 1860s, after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation to end slavery in secessionist Confederate states, surviving the swamps while being chased by slave catchers and their dogs. Ben Foster stars as a ruthless slave hunter and Charmaine Bingwa as an enslaved wife and mother. The film is loosely based on the (possibly conglomerated story) of the lives of either or both of two formerly slaves named Gordon and "Whipped Peter". That story was made famous by the photograph of a man's bare back heavily scourged from an overseer's whippings, which was published worldwide as magazine illustrations in 1863, and gave the abolitionist movement proof of the cruelty of slavery. Producer Joey McFarland began researching that story in 2018, and hired Collage to write the script. The film was officially announc... ()