Actors Will Smith (L) and Antoine Fuqua.
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“Emancipation,” a slave drama directed by Antoine Fuqua and starring Will Smith, will no longer be filmed in Georgia because of a new voting law that was signed by Governor Brian Kemp on March 26.
“Right now, the nation is coming to terms with its history and trying to remove the remnants of institutional racism in order to achieve true racial justice,” Smith and Fuqua said in a joint statement Monday.
“We cannot, with good conscience, provide financial support to a government that adopts regressive voting laws that are designed to restrict voter access,” they said. “Georgia’s new voting laws are reminiscent of the voting impediments that were passed at the end of the Reconstruction to prevent many Americans from voting. Unfortunately, we feel compelled to move our Georgia film production business to another state.”
This is the first film to take its production out of the state due to this legislation.
The new law, which includes a restriction on placement boxes, makes it a crime to provide food or water to voters lined up outside polling stations, requires mandatory proof of identity for absentee voting and creates greater legislative control over how elections are held. . Opponents say these provisions will disproportionately give up people of color.
Since 2008, attractive tax incentives have turned the state into a film and television production center, especially for Netflix, HBO Max, the Disney movie and TV show list and The CW. Georgia has also developed infrastructure for high-budget productions and hosts a highly skilled workforce of crew members, craftsmen and technicians.
Hollywood has been debating how to resolve this recent situation in Georgia. Some called for a boycott of production, while others worried that removing production from the state would do more harm than good. For the most part, the studios that commented on the new law condemned it, but did not commit to stopping production.
The “emancipation,” which Fuqua and Smith produce for Apple Studios, centers around Whipped Peter, a enslaved person who emancipated himself from a southern plantation and joined the Union Army. He is most famous for being the subject of a series of photographs showing the shockingly brutal scars on his back from his whip as a slave.
It is unclear what the financial value will be for moving project production from Georgia, but if Fuqua and Smith, who are both blacks and major players in Hollywood and internationally, support the decision, it could put more pressure on other productions to to leave the state.