Kathryn Bigelow throws her hat into the race ring

Direc­tor Kathryn Bigelow is team­ing up for a third time with screen­writer Mark Boal, who penned The Hurt Lock­er and Zero Dark Thir­ty, for a film about the ​“12^th Street Riot” which sent shock­waves across Amer­i­ca in the sum­mer of ​’67. As Dead­line reports: ​“Boal has been research­ing and work­ing on the project, which explores sys­temic racism in urban Detroit, for more than a year. Although no stu­dio is yet attached, a release date is being tar­get­ed for 2017, the 50^th anniver­sary of the riots.”

The duo are work­ing on the as-yet unti­tled film ahead of a project which looked set to extend their focus on peo­ple caught up in inter­na­tion­al con­flicts. The sto­ry of Bowe Bergdahl cen­tres around a US Army sergeant who was kid­napped and held cap­tive by the Tal­iban for five years. His release in 2014 has not put a lid on his ordeal, as the US mil­i­tary are now try­ing to court mar­tial him on charges of deser­tion and mis­be­hav­iour before the ene­my. As a result of the ongo­ing nature of Bergdahl’s sto­ry, Bigelow and Boal have pushed back their drama­ti­sa­tion in order to allow these events to ful­ly play out.

It is not such a leap to go from con­flict abroad to con­flict at home, though. With The Hurt Lock­er and Zero Dark Thir­ty, Bigelow and Boal have devel­oped a style of taut pro­ce­dur­al that strives not just to rep­re­sent war­fare but to show the polit­i­cal atti­tudes and minu­ti­ae of lives with­in it. Just as Ava DuVernay’s Sel­ma was so pow­er­ful because time has not erad­i­cat­ed the racism depict­ed in her film, so it seems like­ly that despite its his­tor­i­cal set­ting, Bigelow’s film will speak to the present day and the #Black­Lives­Mat­ter move­ment. We look for­ward to find­ing out more about this project as it devel­ops and hope that Boal’s research leads him to author­i­ta­tive collaborators.