A story of redneck redemption Burden
Burden director Andrew Heckler reaches back to 1996 to tell a prescient story for our times. That’s the year that Mike Burden, the subject of Heckler’s searing drama, opened a museum and store — The Redneck Shop — in Laurens, South Carolina. “I read an article, a little blurb in a local newspaper in South Carolina, ‘KKK opens Redneck Shop and Klan Museum in a small Southern town,’” said Heckler, whose film kicks off the Santa Fe Film Festival on Wednesday, Feb. 13. “I couldn’t believe that in 1996, the KKK would do that in the middle of a town. It must have been eight months to a year later, I read another article, and the headline was ‘Klansman sells Klan Museum and Redneck Shop to black Baptist minister.’ ”
Heckler will introduce the film and do a Q&A with the audience. He’s a first-time director and a former movie and television actor. He became obsessed with the story of Burden, who’s now a longtime friend. Burden, a repo man played in the film by Garrett Hedlund, is an orphan who was raised and groomed by the Klan, taught to hate but also to take pride in his own race. At the urging of his girlfriend, a single mom named Judy (Andrea Riseborough), he cuts ties with the Klan but finds himself the target of a vendetta against him. In desperation, he seeks refuge with a black minister, Rev. David Kennedy (Forest Whitaker). In a tense and riveting early scene, Burden sets the sights of his rifle on the reverend and his congregation as they’re protesting the shop and Klan Museum. The reverend, risking his own reputation and family, shelters Burden, his girlfriend, and her son inside his Baptist church.
“I treat filmmaking a little bit like being an undercover reporter,” Heckler said. “I called the reverend and asked if I could come down there and check out the story. So I went down to South Carolina in 1997 and spent 10 days down there with him. I went back to New York where I was living at the time and started piecing together this story.” In researching the story, Heckler felt compelled to infiltrate the Klan, posing as a white supremacist from Colorado. “They welcomed me. It was pretty wild. It was pretty risky.” Heckler engaged with Klan members online and planned to attend a Klan rally until his lawyers advised him against it.
“The truth of the matter is — and this is going to be hard to hear — is that these are people underneath those hoods. It’s really easy to call