Film studio axes Three Billboards festival screening amid sexual assault controversy
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Your support makes all the difference.Fox Searchlight has cancelled a planned screening of Oscar contender Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri at a Texas-based festival following a sexual assault controversy.
According to Variety, the news arrives days after it was reported that the hosts of Fantastic Fest in Austin - Alamo Drafthouse Cinema - had employed the former editor-in-chief of Birth.Movies.Death, Devin Faraci, as a copywriter despite being publicly accused of sexual assault
“In light of recent events, the makers of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri have decided not to participate in Fantastic Fest,” a rep for Fox Searchlight said in a statement.
Faraci's employment has since lef to the exit of Fantastic Fest's programmer, Todd Brown, who Variety reports later “resigned in protest.”
We have reached out to Fantastic Fest for comment.
He wrote in a Facebook post following the revelation: “Anyone who has ever suggested that Fantastic Fest and the Drafthouse is just the geek friendly equivalent of the classic Old Boys Club, you have just been proven correct... I am embarrassed and ashamed to have been any part of this apparatus and I choose now to leave it.”
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which has screened at film festivals in Venice and Toronto in the past fortnight, follows Frances McDormand's Mildred Hayes, a woman seeking justice for her raped and murdered daughter after months go by without an arrest.
Other awards contenders set to be screened at Fantastic Fest include The Killing of a Sacred Deer (A24), Downsizing (Paramount) and Palme d’Or-winner The Square (Magnolia).
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