Filmmakers Jim Sheridan & Andrew Troy Team For ‘I Am A Man: The True Story Of Chief Standing Bear’
EXCLUSIVE: Six-time Academy Award nominee Jim Sheridan (In the Name of the Father) has inked a deal to co-write, direct and produce the historical drama I Am a Man: The True Story of Chief Standing Bear with Andrew Troy.
The film with formal Resolutions of Support from the Ponca Tribe will depict the Ponca’s “Trail of Tears” march that led to the 1879 landmark trial of Standing Bear vs. the United States of America. This mostly unknown legal case helped all Native Americans to be considered “human beings” under the law, also setting legal precedent for many future civil rights matters within the U.S. courts.
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Troy has spent the last decade developing the project, while working to gain the support of U.S. and state officials and Native Americans alike. The filmmaker, who is part Chiricahua Apache, was in attendance in 2019 as leaders of the U.S. Congress hosted a bipartisan unveiling ceremony of a new Chief Standing Bear statue placed in the U.S. Capitol, making Standing Bear one of the first Native persons to be inducted into Statuary Hall. A previous draft of his script for I Am a Man was named an Academy Nicholl semifinalist in 2021.
The Nebraska Legislature has passed a bill providing a one-time, five-million-dollar grant to the production, which will also benefit from the incentives of the Cherokee Nation Film Office. Screen Ireland has also provided development incentives.
Pic will be jointly produced by Troy’s banner Troy Entertainment and Sheridan’s Ireland-based Hell’s Kitchen Limited, along with Luca Matrundola (Waiting for the Barbarians) and longtime Anonymous Content exec Paul Green (The Fifth Estate). Exec producers are Warren Anzalone, Bart Daly, and former Nebraska Senators Colby Coash and Burke Harr.
“Standing Bear has been completely left out of our school text books,” Troy told Deadline. “Traveling the country, I learned that even Native people are unfamiliar with his name and the impact he had on their lives. Chief Standing Bear’s story needs to be told.”
“I’m delighted to be working with Andrew on this wonderful project,” added Sheridan.
An Irish playwright and filmmaker whose films have won two Oscars from a total of sixteen nominations, Sheridan is best known for titles including My Left Foot, which had Daniel Day-Lewis playing Christy Brown, the Irish artist born with cerebral palsy who taught himself to paint and write with the titular limb alone. Day-Lewis earned his first Best Actor Oscar for his performance and would be back in the race four years later, after reteaming with Sheridan for the Guilford Four drama, In the Name of the Father. The pair found their third project in 1997’s The Boxer, with Sheridan then going on to co-write, direct and produce In America, an Oscar-nominated drama chronicling an Irish immigrant family’s adjustment to life in Hell’s Kitchen, while grappling with the loss of a child. Sheridan later directed Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal, Natalie Portman and more in a remake of the 2004 Danish film Brothers, seeing that post-war drama gross $43M+ worldwide and bring Maguire his first Golden Globe nomination.
Troy most recently directed the forthcoming adoption drama Midnight in the Orange Grove, based on true events, from his script written with American Psycho‘s Guinevere Turner. That film tells the story of a young woman who is jarred into remembering a tragedy long buried in her subconscious. Through therapy, a blossoming romance and the appearance of a mysterious woman, past and present collide as she’s forced to confront the murder-suicide that changed her life as a child.
Sheridan is represented by WME, Lisa Richards Agency in Dublin and Schreck Rose Dapello.
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