Drafthouse Acquires Sundance Award-Winning Doc ‘The Overnighters’
Drafthouse Films has acquired North American rights to Jesse Moss’ acclaimed documentary “The Overnighters.” The film world premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival where it won a Special Jury Award for Intuitive Filmmaking. It recently screened at the True/False Film Festival and is soon set to screen at the upcoming Tribeca Film Festival. Drafthouse plans to open the film theatrically later this year.
Here’s the synopsis per Drafthouse:
Filmmaker Jesse Moss spent 18 months in
North Dakota as a one-man-documentary-crew intimately capturing
extraordinary portraits of broken men and examining the tension between
the moral imperative to “love thy
neighbor,” and the response of one small town congregation and
community when confronted by an influx of desperate strangers. In the midst of the struggling economic
climate of the United States, the oil business in small town Williston,
North Dakota is booming. Thousands of desperate men and women are
flocking to the region in search
of work with little more than the clothes on their backs or the cars
they arrived in. The great demand for housing has overwhelmed the
community with many of those who have found employment without a place
to live. Pastor Jay Reinke of Concordia Lutheran Church
is under fire from the City Council, his community and the local
newspapers for his heartfelt desire to open the church’s doors to allow
the “overnighters” – as he calls them – to stay for a night, a week or
sometimes even longer, sleeping on the floor, in
the pews and in their cars in the Church parking lot. When the town
learns that Reinke is housing men with criminal records, and a mounting controversy peaks within the pastor’s personal life,
even his diehard quest for humanity can’t stop things from spiraling vastly out of control.
In his Sundance review, Indiewire’s Eric Kohn called “The Overnighters” “one of the most remarkable examples of layered non-fiction storytelling to come along in some time.”
Read More: Confronting Dangerous Townspeople While Shooting “The Overnighters”
A
portion of all box office receipts will be donated to local affordable housing charities.
