Personal Shopper and Twilight actress Kristen Stewart has been cast in the independent political thriller, Against All Enemies, in the role of Saint Joan actress Jean Seberg.
Stewart joins Anthony Mackie, who will portray a civil rights activist and Jack O’Connell who has been cast as an FBI agent assigned to surveil the actress. Margaret Qualley and Colm Meaney will also star. Una director, Benedict Andrews will take the helm on a script by Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse.
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The story will focus on attempts by the FBI to discredit Seberg through its Cointelpro program in retaliation for her support of the Black Panther Party. Those efforts included creating a false story in 1970 that the child Seberg was carrying was not fathered by her husband, but by a member of the Black Panther Party.
Seberg, whose career spanned from 1957 to the year of her death, 1979, starred in films such as The Mouse That Roared, Moment to Moment, A Fine Madness, Paint Your Wagon, however, she became one of the best-known targets of the FBI COINTELPRO project when during the late 1960s, Seberg provided financial support to various groups supporting civil rights, such as the NAACP as well as Native American school groups The FBI was upset about several gifts to the Black Panther Party, these were noted among a list of other celebrities in FBI internal documents later declassified and released to the public under FOIA requests. The financial support and alleged interracial love affairs or friendships are thought to have been triggers to an FBI investigation.
La La Land” producer Fred Berger, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones of Automatik, Kate Garwood, Stephen Hopkins and Andrew Levitas of Metalwork Pictures will be producing. The film is due to start filming during the summer.