This past Friday marked the three year anniversary of the Boston Marathon Bombing. Three years would also appear to be the amount of time that the entertainment industry are willing to wait before eulogising events on screen and stage.
A spate of projects are currently in production. They range from Patriots Day- a big budget, all star blockbuster directed by Peter Berg, to a fictionalised short, Jahar, which looks at how the actions of one of the bombers affected his school friends (made by those said school friends).
There's also a piece of documentary theatre, called Finish Line, playing in the city at present.
Ahead of the release of a movie called Stronger, where Jake Gyllenhaal plays Boston marathon bombing survivor Jeff Bauman, both men threw out the ceremonial first pitches at Fenway Park during the annual Patriots' Day Game.
Art Lawler, whose daughter was injured in the bombing, told the Massachusetts based website,MassLive, that he plans to see that movie. But he will not see Berg's.
"My daughter was close to death, and I think the other movie is just an exploitation of the tragic events of that week," Lawler said.
Native son Mark Wahlberg is the star of Berg's flick. Negative sentiments towards that picture were stirred up when they filmed at the finish line of The Patriots' Day marathon (where members of a victims family were competing).
Bill Richard, the father of eight year old victim, Martin Richard, said that while he met with Wahlberg- and considers him 'a stand up guy', he didn't want to see his family portrayed in Patriots Day.
Meanwhile, according to The Week, residents of Watertown- where the real life bombers got into a shoot out with the police, have opposed its plans to use the area in their recreation of that climatic gun battle.
“We’re aspiring for real authenticity so that means filming in real locations,” director Peter Berg told the Boston Globe last month. “We will always ask and we will always be transparent with what our ask is. If there’s one person who’s uncomfortable, we’re more than happy to go elsewhere.”
Perhaps the most controversial project is one undertaken by two of bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's friends from high school. The 12-minute film, called Jahar-for Tsarnaev's Americanized nickname, premiered on Saturday at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, according to Fox News.
“We weren’t going into it trying to unravel why he did it,” writer Zolan Kanno-Youngs- who also writes for The Wall Street Journal, said. “We were going into it to tell a story about the other types of pain that he caused – the collateral damage – about how it hurt his friends.”
Richard Serino, who was at the site of the bombings, as a deputy administrator for FEMA, sees the benefit of turning the attack into a movie, telling MassLive-"It hopefully will show the grace of the people of Boston, the heroics of the people of Boston, the heroics of the first responders, but mainly for the survivors and what they did, to cherish the memory of those we lost that day,".
