Film News Roundup

Film Movement has acquired the North American rights to Bill Duke’s 1984 historical drama “The Killing Floor,” winner of the Special Jury Award at the 1985 Sundance Film Festival.

The film has received a 4K digital restoration by the UCLA Film & Television Archive in time to commemorate the 100th Anniversary of the riots that swept the country in 1919. The film will have a limited theatrical run followed by release on all home entertainment and digital platforms.

Damien Leake stars as a black sharecropper from Mississippi who came to Chicago during World War I, hoping for more racial equality. When he lands a job as a laborer on “the killing floor” of a giant Chicago meatpacking plant, he finds a place seething with racial antagonism. His decision to support the union causes his Southern friends to turn against him.

Production was made possible by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Illinois Humanities, American Playhouse, several foundations, and more than 40 unions and two corporations.