White Pine Pictures has just announced the world broadcast premiere of Omar Khadr: Out of the Shadows on May 28th at 9:00pm/9:30pm NT on CBC-TV.
ICI Radio-Canada Télé will also broadcast the documentary on Saturday, May 30, at 9 p.m.
The film features unprecedented access and exclusive interviews with Omar Khadr during his first few days of freedom in Edmonton, where he was released on bail May 7 after nearly 13 years in detention.
Directed by award-winning filmmaker Patrick Reed and co-directed by journalist and author Michelle Shephard, Omar Khadr: Out of the Shadows is an intimate portrait of how a teenager from a Toronto suburb ended up being at the centre of one of the first U.S. war crimes trials since the prosecution of Nazi commanders in the 1940s and the only juvenile ever tried. Out of the Shadows gives Omar Khadr the opportunity to speak for himself on camera, for the first time.
Based in part on Shephard’s authoritative book Guantanamo’s Child: The Untold Story of Omar Khadr, the documentary takes us from his childhood spent traveling between a Canadian suburb and Peshawar at the height of the jihad against the Soviets, into Afghanistan and the homes of Al Qaeda’s elite, and back to Canada again as he’s released on bail thirteen years after first being shot and captured by the U.S military.
The TV documentary will be followed by a full feature length film later this year.
Director/Producer Patrick Reed has directed and collaborated on several award-winning documentaries for White Pine Pictures. Many of Reed’s films explore human rights issues, following compelling characters as they struggle with the past and present. One of his first assignments with White Pine was researching and producing Shake Hands With The Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire, which won the World Cinema Documentary Audience Award at Sundance 2006, and Best Documentary Emmy in 2007. In 2012 he directed a follow up film Fight Like Soldiers Die Like Children which followed Dallaire on his new mission to eradicate the use of child soldiers.