For a little indie film, "American Violet" has had a big impact on the players involved.
The film, which opens Friday, is based on the true story of Regina Kelly, a single mother wrongly accused of dealing drugs after a raid at her housing project in Hearne, Texas. Kelly, who rejected a plea deal and faced 25 years in prison, became the lead plaintiff in an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit that accused the district attorney's office of targeting minorities.
Director Bill Haney tells Kelly's story through a character renamed Dee Roberts. Haney has said that when he first heard about Kelly on NPR, he pulled his car over to the side of the road and cried.
Former Atlantan Nicole Beharie plays the character in the film. She says she was quite antsy when Kelly showed up on the set.
"I was pretty on edge," Beharie says. "I was just nervous about whether she was going to like my performance, and I was confused about whether it was going to affect it."
A graduate of Juilliard, Beharie attended elementary and middle school in Stone Mountain. She credits Jackie Henry, a teacher at Main Street Elementary School (now E.L. Miller Elementary) with charting her course.
"You know when you feel like there's an investment with you. I could tell there was an effort, and I was young. She played classical music, read poems and talked to us about responsibility. It really affected my life," says Beharie, who also appeared in "The Express," the 2008 film about Ernie Davis, the first African-American to receive the Heisman Trophy.
Even with the film's many layers, some of Kelly's worst experiences didn't make it to the screen, Beharie says.
"She was disadvantaged in every way, but once her freedom was taken away she didn't consider the option of a plea. I think black women, or minority women in particular, are often, I want to say, underestimated. Everyone was underestimating her."
Kelly's story of injustice hits a universal chord, says veteran actor Will Patton, who plays an attorney who assists the ACLU. Years earlier, his character was silent when several white men beat a young black man to death.
"It's not so much that [my character] did something wrong but that he knew something was going on and he turned the other way," says Patton, a Charleston native. "I know people who lived in the South and maybe there could've been some kind of bravery that could have taken place that maybe didn't."
Patton says, he, too, had an emotional moment during filming. It was a court deposition scene in which Beharie's character was being badgered by a lawyer.
"She stands up and says, 'I do know what it's like to be locked away and taken from your children for something you haven't done.' " Patton recalls. "Something about the way she did it and about those words really hit me. Finally I had to get up and go hide in the men's room [to keep] from letting everybody see me crying."
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