RELATED: 2012 Sundance: Q&A With 'West Of Memphis' Producers Peter Jackson And Fran Walsh
BREAKING: West of Memphis, the Amy Berg-directed documentary that was one of the highlights of the last Sundance Film Festival, will join the Mavericks section of the 2012 Toronto Film Festival. The film, which is largely based on private investigators and forensic testing financed by Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh (they produce with West Memphis 3 member Damien Echols and his wife Lorri Davis), will get a premiere. There to help the filmmakers launch the film and participate in the press conference and Q&A will be Johnny Depp and Dixie Chicks singer Natalie Maines. Both have been longtime supporters of a retrial for Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr, who were convicted of triple homicide even though there was not a shred of physical evidence. Depp also acquired the upcoming memoir by Echols for a feature. The sham of that original trial was captured in the HBO docu Paradise Lost, which became a trilogy and which sparked Jackson and Walsh's interest in the case years ago. The defendants were finally let out of prison after nearly two decades in Arkansas after prosecutors granted them an Alford plea (technically pleading 'guilty' while vehemently denying they committed the crime). All parties are still pressing for an outright exoneration, but the state has refused to consider it because of the milllions of dollars in costs it would incur in civil suits for wrongly imprisoning the three men. Some of the evidence presented in West of Memphis paints an overwhelming picture that the trio was railroaded while the killer of three 8-year old boys remains free. The trio just celebrated the one year anniversary of their freedom, but how does one get back nearly two lost decades of a life? Sony Pictures Classics will release the doc, which has to be seen to be believed.
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