Oscar winner Viola Davis and NBA star Stephen Curry announced Thursday that they would sign on as executive producers for Emanuel, a documentary about the mass shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, of nine black churchgoers in 2015 by a white supremacist.
According to Variety, one of the driving forces behind Davis and Curry attaching their names to the project was for marketing purposes, as the team behind the film is still looking for a distribution partner.
“We along with the country, grieved each family’s loss,” Davis and JuVee Productions producer Julius Tennon, who also joined the film, said in a joint statement.
“Yet, miraculously, from this devastation we witnessed tremendous benchmarks of humanity. The survivors found courage to love in the face of hate.”
On June 17, 2015, Dylann Roof shot and killed nine members of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church during a prayer meeting.
The documentary was made in partnership with the city of Charleston, as well as with all affected families of the shooting.
Initially screened at Geena Davis’s 2018 Bentonville Film Festival in May, the film has been described by producers as “a poignant story of justice and faith, love and hate, and the healing power of forgiveness.”
Curry in a statement said he hopes “the film inspires others like it does me.”
Christopher Singleton, whose mother Sharonda Coleman-Singleton died in the shooting, thanked Curry on Instagram, saying, “Blessings on blessings” and ended his brief caption with the hashtag “#CantLetMomsDown.”
CORRECTION
The name of the Bentonville Film Festival was misstated in an earlier version of this post.