Roadside Picks Up ‘Escape Fire’ Healthcare Documentary

LOS ANGELES, CA – May 30, 2012 – Roadside Attractions has acquired all U.S. rights to the award-winning documentary, Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare, which had its world premiere at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and captured prizes at the recent Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and Newport Beach Film Festival, where it took Outstanding Documentary and Outstanding Director Achievement Awards.

Co-directed by Matthew Heineman and Academy Award-nominee Susan Froemke (Lalee’s Kin: The Legacy of Cotton), Escape Fire looks at a U.S. healthcare system designed to profit on disease not health, reward quantity over quality, and promote high-tech over high-touch. It interweaves dramatic personal stories with the efforts of leaders battling to transform healthcare at the highest levels of medicine, industry, government, and even the U.S. military.

Roadside Attractions will distribute the film theatrically on Oct. 5. Lionsgate has all other rights under their output deal with Roadside.

“Before I saw Escape Fire, I thought the problems surrounding healthcare were unsolvable, but the film shows that we have the power to fix this,” says Roadside Attractions co-president Howard Cohen. “The upcoming Supreme Court ruling on the federal mandate to buy health insurance guarantees that the healthcare debate will be re-ignited and inserted into the 2012 election in a big way, and this important film offers solutions that need to be part of that dialogue.”

“We are thrilled to be collaborating with Roadside Attractions, especially given their amazing track record with great docs like The Cove and Supersize Me ,” says Heineman. “Healthcare has become a political football thrown back and forth in Washington. But left and right don’t matter when the system’s burning. Our film dissects the problem but also looks at the solutions (or ‘escape fires’) that are right in front of us.”

The deal was negotiated by Cohen on behalf of Roadside Attractions and by CAA and Jerry L. Dasti of Sloss Eckhouse LawCo on behalf of the filmmakers.