Trailer and Character Posters for ‘Freeheld,’ starring Oscar winner Julianne Moore

With 2015 marking the year that all same-sex marriages became legal in the United States 2005 seems so long ago now. For Laurel Hester and Stacie Andree, their battle for equal rights and representation under the law was a hard fought battle in the early days of the same-sex marriage debate. Hester (played by Academy Award winner Julianne Moore, Still Alice) is a 23-year veteran of the New Jersey police department who discovers she has terminal lung cancer. She tries to ensure that her partner Stacie (played by Oscar nominee Ellen Page and for whom this has been a passion project) will receive her pension and death benefits just as her straight male colleagues would be able to provide to their widows at the time of their death. She is thwarted by the Freeholders, a section of the county governments of New Jersey.

They embark on a crusade of activism with the help of Laurel’s police partner Dale Wells (played by Oscar nominee Michael Shannon), Josh Charles (The Good Wife) as an empathetic Freeholder and Oscar nominee Steve Carell (Foxcatcher) as a fellow LGBT activist who works on their case.

Freeheld is directed by Peter Sollett (Raising Victor Vargas) and written by Oscar nominee Ron Nyswaner (Philadelphia) It’s inspired by a true story and adapted from Cynthia Wade’s Oscar-winning 2007 documentary short. The film will be released by Lionsgate this October.

Check out the very timely character posters and trailer below.

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Hollywood Critics Association (HCA) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.

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