Rialto Pictures has acquired rights to Idris Elba‘s Directorial Debut, Yardie and will release the film in theaters on March 15.
Starring Aml Ameen, The film recently had its world premiere at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.
The cast also includes Shantol Jackson, Stephen Graham, Fraser James, Sheldon Shepherd, & Everaldo Cleary.
The film is the big-screen adaptation of Victor Headley’s 1992 novel which is set in 1980s Hackney, and follows the rise of a young Jamaican in London’s drug-dealing underworld. The novel borrows its title from a slang term originally given to occupants of housing projects.
Set in ’70s Kingston and ’80s Hackney, Yardie centres on the life of a young Jamaican man named D (Aml Ameen), who has never fully recovered from the murder, committed during his childhood, of his older brother Jerry Dread (Everaldo Creary). D grows up under the wing of a Kingston Don and music producer named King Fox (Sheldon Shepherd). Fox dispatches him to London, where he reconnects with his childhood sweetheart, Yvonne (Shantol Jackson), and his daughter who he’s not seen since she was a baby. He also hooks up with a soundclash crew, called High Noon. But before he can be convinced to abandon his life of crime and follow “the righteous path,” he encounters the man who shot his brother 10 years earlier, and embarks on a bloody, explosive quest for retribution — a quest which brings him into conflict with vicious London gangster Rico (Stephen Graham).
“I’m very happy that this movie is going to get play in the States,” Elba said in a release announcing the deal. “It falls in line with a very specific Afro Caribbean experience by the way of Kingston, Jamaica and East London but plays right into the heart of the universal human experience of loss and trauma. My work as an actor both in the UK and U.S. informed every decision I made as a director and my love of music give this film a pulse I know they will feel in Brooklyn.”
Elba is next up in the Netflix comedy series Turn Up Charlie, which he created, produced and starred in.
Official Trailer
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