Haley Bennett, the first recipient of EnergaCamerimage Film Festival’s New Generation Acting Award, will follow Joe Wright’s “Cyrano” with Whoopi Goldberg-produced “Till,” about the infamous murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American boy lynched in Mississippi in 1955 after being accused of “offending” white woman Carolyn Bryant.
Her husband and his half-brother were acquitted, but later confessed to the murder.“In America, it was a reckoning, but I didn’t have a deep knowledge of it.
I thought: ‘I can’t be the only one.’ Bringing this story to light again, at the time when we desperately need it, was important to me,” Bennett tells Variety at the festival in Toruń, Poland, admitting that playing Bryant meant “carrying around hate and fear, paranoia and anger.”“I don’t want to live in ignorance.
If I can learn something about the history of America, then I am not standing still.
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