In April, jurors found Chauvin, 45, guilty of second-degree murder, third-degree murder and manslaughter in the killing of Floyd, when the former officer pinned his knee to Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes. The 46-year-old’s death was caught on a viral video that fueled a national reckoning on social justice, race and police brutality.
Wearing a shirt with the words “Arrest the Cops Who KilledBreonna Taylor,” Free described his film as being about “a Black man trying to get home to his dog.” But while the plot “sounds simple,” he explained, “you can complicate that in many ways when you’re telling a story about America.”
“So he runs into a cop and the cop ends up killing him and he wakes up and the day starts all over again,” the filmmaker told hostEllen DeGeneres. “He finds himself going through this loop, trying to figure out how to break the cycle ofrunning into this cop and trying to change his behaviorand do things different, and having the same memories of it.”
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Travon Free (L); George Floyd.Facebook
Travon Free (L) onThe Ellen DeGeneres Show.Michael Rozman/Warner Bros.
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Free — who wroteTwo Distant Strangers, his directorial debut, in just five days — said he was moved to make the 29-minute film whileparticipating in protests following Floyd’s murderlast summer, “absorbing the energy that the world had taken on once he had been killed.”
“In doing that and repeating that cycle every day and internalizing the feelings you feel when you hear a new name —Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd,” he shared. “As a Black person, you go through this cycle of emotions to process these things, and I found myself going through my cycle for these three different people and they were overlapping, and it just felt like living the worst version ofGroundhog Day.”
“When I had that thought, it was something that just stuck with me, and I felt like I had to do something with it,” Free said.
Travon Free onThe Ellen DeGeneres Show.Michael Rozman/Warner Bros.
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Of taking home the Oscar, Free told DeGeneres, 63, that he was honored just to be nominated but thought his team “had a good shot” at winning.
“My fearwas always that this film is abouta subject matter that’s so polarizing to people. Will it be embraced for all of its parts — the technicality, the story, the emotion, the work that we put into it? And could people see beyond their opinion on what they feel about the subject matter to look at the art form and what we created?” he said.
Free went on to say he was “nervous” that his story might be too “heavy” to win the award, compared to other nominees that were “easier to watch” and “not as confronting” as his film.
Addressing the storyline about the man wanting to get to his dog, he added: “It’s such a calming thing to want to just go home to something or someone who loves you. And for us, we hear time and time again how those stories are impeded for reasons they shouldn’t be impeded for, whether it’s being stopped in your car[or walking down the street] for thinking you’rethe wrong person. It just felt like the easiest way for this story to connect beyond the color of your skin was to connect it to something we all want to do: just get home safely.”
Two Distant Strangersis streaming onNetflixnow.
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source: people.com
