The director of the upcoming film “American Trial: The Eric Garner Story” is explaining why he set out to imagine a trial that never happened.
Garner died in July 2014 in Staten Island, New York, after NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo placed him in a chokehold during an arrest. Pantaleo’s lawyers have said he used a takedown technique and not a chokehold. A grand jury declined to indict Pantaleo in December 2014, so the case never went to trial. The NYPD fired Pantaleo in August 2019.
Director Roee Messinger, 33, is making his first film. Instead of retelling the real events, the movie imagines what a trial might have looked like if a grand jury had indicted Pantaleo. The Hollywood Reporter reports that the film uses real lawyers, experts and witnesses, along with Garner’s widow, Esaw. Anthony Altieri is the only professional actor and plays Pantaleo. The film premieres October 12 at the New York Film Festival.
Messinger was born in Israel and raised in Mexico City, and says he also wanted to look at American policing from an outsider’s point of view. He told The Hollywood Reporter the outcome of the Garner case disturbed him while he was in film school in New York, and that he realized it would be possible to reach the kind of people who would have taken part in a trial.
He said he hopes audiences leave the theater talking. “Why was there never a trial?” he said, one of several questions he wants viewers to ask about race and the justice system.
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