January 27, 2020
It’s such an unlikely tale, one that reveals the deep racial fault lines of a small Upstate town and reactivates fears of the violence and hate endured by older African Americans in this place. It’s a remarkable journey that conveys the power of faith and reconciliation. This strange story about the Klansman and the black preacher — still unfolding today — has angered many in Laurens and has thrilled them, too.
The Rev. David Kennedy and his New Beginning Missionary Baptist Church, with community support, and backing from 101 Studios, established The Echo Project, a nonprofit that is overseeing the renovation of the Echo Theater in Laurens, S.C. 101 Studios has launched the website rehabhate.com, which is linked to the church’s Go Fund Me site, charity.gofundme.com/echoproject. Funds collected from donors will be used to pay for the renovation work and for programming at the new community center.
January 30, 2020
101 Studios has debuted the second trailer for indie drama Burden, a film about the KKK and a former Klansman who gives up his ways thanks to the help of a local reverend.
January 29, 2020
LAURENS, S.C. (AP) — Not many years ago in a small, rural South Carolina town stood The Redneck Shop — a racist emporium and Ku Klux Klan museum housed in an old theater, where white supremacist neo-Nazis gave heil-Hitler salutes and flaunted swastikas and Rebel flags. That building, once the property of the Klan, now belongs to a black preacher and committed foe of racism who fought the group for more than 20 years. The Rev. David Kennedy plans to transform it into a shrine of reconciliation.
October 23, 2019
Here’s the trailer for Burden, writer-director Andrew Heckler’s film that was inspired by true events and premiered in competition at Sundance last year. Garret Hedlund stars as Mike Burden, a taciturn repo man raised as an orphan within the Ku Klux Klan who is fiercely loyal to the local Klan leader and toxic father figure (Tom Wilkinson). But Burden has a change of heart after falling for a single mother (Andrea Riseborough), who urges him to leave for a better life together.
June 18, 2019
David Glasser’s 101 Studios has picked up the U.S. rights to Burden, Andrew Heckler’s Southern, 1990s-set drama that stars Garrett Hedlund as a Ku Klux Klan member who has a change of heart.
November 18, 2018
The Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home is proud to present the third installment of the Fall 2018 Lecture Series in the parlor of the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home on Lafayette Square. Courtney Hargrave is the author of Burden: A Preacher, A Klansman and a True Story of Redemption in the Modern South, published August 2018. Hargrave has written more than a dozen books, including numerous New York Times best sellers. Her most recent work, Burden, recounts the true story of an unlikely friendship between a former Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, Michael Burden, and S.C. African American preacher, Reverend David Kennedy, and has been made into a critically acclaimed film starring Forest Whitaker and Usher. Burden explores many of the same themes that resonate in Flannery O’Connor’s work, most notably, grace and redemption. Hargrave’s talk will expand on the events described in this meticulously researched work, as well as examine the story’s current relevance and importance.
November 10, 2018
The true events that inspired the upcoming major motion picture starring Forest Whitaker, Garrett Hedlund, Andrea Riseborough, and Usher! Burden: A Preacher, a Klansman, and a True Story of Redemption in the Modern South tells the harrowing true story about the modern Ku Klux Klan and an act of compassion that shook a community in the Deep South. Meet author Courtney Hargrave at the book festival on Nov. 10th!
October 1, 2018
Former Ku Klux Klan member Mike Burden’s life was transformed when he formed a friendship with Reverend David Kennedy, a Black preacher he once planned to assassinate. “Burden,” a book by Courtney Hargrave on the pair’s story, is now being made into a movie by Andrew Heckler. Burden, Kennedy, Hargrave and Heckler join Megyn Kelly for a discussion about this story of redemption.
June 25, 2018
Andrew Heckler’s “Burden” and the documentary “Bathtubs Over Broadway” took top film honors at the 23rd annual Nantucket Film Festival.
June 25, 2018
Andrew Heckler’s Burden won the audience award for best narrative feature at the 23rd annual Nantucket Film Festival. The awards, unveiled today as the five-day festival wrapped, saw Jesse Peretz’s Juliet, Naked, written by Evgenia Peretz, Jim Taylor and Tamara Jenkins, take home the runner-up prize.
January 27, 2018
After 10 days and 123 feature films, the 2018 Sundance Film Festival’s Awards Ceremony took place tonight, with host Jason Mantzoukas emceeing and jurors presenting 28 prizes for feature filmmaking in Park City, Utah.
Writer/director Andrew Heckler, producer Robbie Brenner, and stars Garrett Hedlund, Forest Whitaker, Crystal R. Fox, and Usher Raymond stopped by the Variety Studio presented by AT&T to talk about their new film, “Burden.”
January 25, 2018
“Burden” and “Minding the Gap” are among the best movies coming out of Park City.
January 22, 2018
If Mike Burden didn’t actually exist, and writer and director Andrew Heckler created a fictional character, it wouldn’t work. But as it happens, Mike Burden was a KKK member who left the Klan because of the love of a good woman, eventually aligning himself with an African American minister he was once prepared to assassinate, all while laboring mightily under the, get this, burden implied by his surname. It sounds too neat, too crazy, too scripted. But he is real, and so is Heckler’s decades-in-the-making biopic “Burden,” which isn’t neat, crazy, or too scripted.